I recently completed a personal highlight reel of performances going back over ten years (I picked only the very best, and kept it around 40 minutes, which is about all a producer is going to tolerate).
Naturally, all the newer stuff (2004-2010) is widescreen, DVCam or better quality, and the older stuff (1998-2003) is analog 4:3 from SVHS and Hi8 tapes. The analog tape footage, despite "some" good captures of good performances, look very dated.
After cleaning up the colors and sharpening a bit, I accidentally stumbled across a way to make these old clips look a little more widescreen"ish". I threw a SD clip of the old material up on the screen and discovered I had rendered it at 720x480 square pixels, rather than .9091. The side pillars were smaller, the distortion wasn't that bad (compared to 16:9), no vertical enlarge/crop, and the material "fit" much better with the newer widescreen stuff.
Just thought I'd throw it up as yet another alternative to an old dilemma, though this idea is definitely not for purists.
Naturally, all the newer stuff (2004-2010) is widescreen, DVCam or better quality, and the older stuff (1998-2003) is analog 4:3 from SVHS and Hi8 tapes. The analog tape footage, despite "some" good captures of good performances, look very dated.
After cleaning up the colors and sharpening a bit, I accidentally stumbled across a way to make these old clips look a little more widescreen"ish". I threw a SD clip of the old material up on the screen and discovered I had rendered it at 720x480 square pixels, rather than .9091. The side pillars were smaller, the distortion wasn't that bad (compared to 16:9), no vertical enlarge/crop, and the material "fit" much better with the newer widescreen stuff.
Just thought I'd throw it up as yet another alternative to an old dilemma, though this idea is definitely not for purists.