Letterbox (mask?) a SD 4x3 project?

richard-amirault wrote on 2/20/2010, 7:32 PM
I shoot SD 4x3. I want to try something different for my next project if possible. I want to deliver a letterboxed wide screen DVD. By letterboxed I mean there woud be black bars on all four sides of the image when viewed 'normally' on a 16x9 TV. A 4x3 screen would only show bars at the top & bottom.I do not want to squeeze the image from 4x3 to 16x9, but instead crop out the top and bottom.

Why? Many widescreen TV's today have a zoom feature that will expand such an image to fill the screen (without distortion).

Comments

farss wrote on 2/20/2010, 9:06 PM
"I do not want to squeeze the image from 4x3 to 16x9, but instead crop out the top and bottom."

You can't squeeze the image from 4:3 to 16:9, all you can do is mask the top and bottom of the frame. Well you could try to stretch the 4:3 to fill the 16:9 frame but then you get short, fat people, not good.


There is another way you might be able to shoot 16:9 without buying a new camera and that's to look around for a second hand anamorphic adaptor. Century Optics used to make a pretty good one that was quite expensive but pretty much useless today, you might get one real cheap off Ebay if you're lucky. Just make certain it has no dings, the front element was very exposed and easily damaged. Of course you need to check the lens has the same or larger thread size than your camera and from memory they had limited zoom through.

Just in case you're not aware of this, doing what you're planning to do does mean loosing some vertical resolution. It might be acceptable if you keep your shots really tight, avoid wide shots of open spaces.

Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 2/21/2010, 4:26 AM
You could take your footage & put it in a 16:9 project, then use pan/crop to zoom in to 16:9. Should work!
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/21/2010, 4:57 AM
Probably the easiest way to do this is to buy New Blue FX Video Essentials II and drop the Letterbox plug-in on your main video bus. That's it you're done. It will letterbox your entire project. There are also lots of other great plug-ins in that set but this one will solve your problem with one click.

If you don't want to spend any money then the next easiest thing is to drop your 4:3 project into another 4:3 project and use the Mask tool in Pan/Crop on that one big event and crop the top and bottom off. I assume you want a letterboxed 4:3 project and not a 16:9 project.

~jr
craftech wrote on 2/21/2010, 5:31 AM
There are extensive discussions on using your GL2 to shoot 16:9 widescreen here.

John
Laurence wrote on 2/23/2010, 6:22 PM
I kind of hate letterboxed SD. The problem is that while it looks ok on an old 4:3 CRT TV, it has bars on all four sides on a 16:9 set. Quite pointless, especially since a lot of people have rid themselves of their old CRT TVs since digital TV became the only broadcast method.
Byron K wrote on 2/25/2010, 12:04 PM
Not sure if you received the answer to your question but I just accidentally stumbled upon this technique to provide a 16:9 formant in SD screen.

Needed to get a 720p 16:9 video demo to a friend so I just rendered the 720p video in DVD NTSC format. The output was a lower res 16:9 format video in a 4:3 screen, which actually looked pretty good.

His PC could not play back .m2t files so had to convert to .mpg. Good enough for demo purposes. Final project will be full res DVD.