letterbox

s k r o o t a y p wrote on 3/26/2011, 3:53 PM
at time of rendering, when leaving the option "stretch...(do not letterbox) unchecked, should that give you the horiz. black bars across top and bottom? are those bars what's referred to as letterbox?

i ask because in order to clean up cropping irregularities i usually render to avi, bring back into studio and render again with widescreen crop setting. but can i render the first time w/ the widescreen bars added then? the letterbox option seemed to suggest this.

thanks!
david

Comments

richard-amirault wrote on 3/28/2011, 11:17 AM
I don't know the answer to your question. However, remember that you don't need to render the ENTIRE project to get your answer. A test render of 5 seconds is all that is necessary to see if it will work or not.
knockatoone wrote on 4/4/2011, 8:00 AM
Yes those bars are what is called letterbox.
Sorry - your question is not clear to me -sounds like you want the black bars top and bottom on your final product? You get them when you take widescreen media(16x9) and want to play it on a regular screen in 3X4 - the bars fill in above and below the widescreen to mainatin the original video picture. If you are doing a widescreen project - why not just render as a wide screen project ? -just make sure all stills have been "adjusted" to be 16x9 on the time line.
Also , personal experience says that everytime you render or rerender a project you will get some loss in quality (compressing yet again). Editing programs like Adobe Premier Elemtns have a setting to preventt re-render of already renedered media for this reason ...I avoid rerendering if at all possible...
Hopefully the smart guys will chime in and make sure I have this straight. Wikipedia has a very good explanation of " letterbox".