Comments

James Green wrote on 4/3/2005, 11:17 PM
The short answer is no...
If you shot your footage with the camera's 16:9 letterbox setting, I'm afraid you're stuck with it. there is no way to convert it back to 4:3 since that's how it was laid to tape. The only way to get 4:3 is to do exactly what you don't want to to and that's to crop it down to 4:3. You'll take a majow quality hit though.
Someone I know accidentally shot in letterbox mode for a no-budget commercial they were doing and was faced with the same problem. I suggested that they bleed their graphics off of the 16:9 frame and into the black bars. It helped punch up the graphics a bit and he was ultimately able to disguise his mistake. Remember, even if you've only got 16:9 video, you've still got a 4:3 frame. There's no reason any graphics and such need to be places only over the video. Of course, this trick only will work in certain instances.

James Green
jaegersing wrote on 4/4/2005, 1:56 AM
If you bring 16:9 clips into a 4:3 project, Vegas will automatically letterbox them for you and you can render this out as a 4:3 file. The image area gets a bit smaller of course due to the black bars, but you do get the full picture and it usually looks OK.

The alternative is to crop the sides using Pan/Crop and let Vegas stretch the remaining portion up to full width. There is some degradation in the image because of the stretching, but only you can decide whether it is tolerable. How the original video was framed is also a major factor, since everything at the left and right edges will get truncated.

I would suggest you try out both methods on a short sample clip and see which one you prefer.

Richard Hunter

farss wrote on 4/4/2005, 5:26 AM
Another way is to go for 14:9, very popular down here, looks OK on both 16:9 and 4:3, I wish Vegas had a 14:9 template, not that you can't make your own of course.