Project size vs render output

Coachrb wrote on 4/24/2007, 10:27 AM

I've recently purchased a Canon XL2 to shoot some video for my company and some small indy stuff. Since the raw footage is recorded in 720 x 480 and I want to reduce the size on the output image for the web how do you change the size and still keep the aspect ratio.

Here is an example of a web clip that's 500 x 207 and give it that Cinema look to the clip.

http://www.techincproductions.com/quicktime/mv_sanctity.htm

If I just change the output settings on the render to 500 x 207 then it will just have black bars on the left and right of my video. SO my question is how do you accomplish what was done in the clip above without allow the video to stretch to fill the window.

Hope this makes sense...sorry for the newbie question, but it seems easier to ask in this forum then spending days trying to figure this out.

Thanks in advance

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/24/2007, 10:31 AM

For this sort of thing it will probably help if you first set the project properties to match your inteded output. Change the project properties to 504x208 (most compressed formats require the sizes to be multiples of 8) and a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0. Open up the Pan/Crop window for the clip on the timeline, right-mouse-button click in the croping frame, and choose "match output aspect". This will crop the source video to exactly match the output frame. The image will be sized so that the it completely fills the frame, rather than being completely contained within the frame. This means that you may lose parts of the image rather than getting black bars on the sides.

Coachrb wrote on 4/24/2007, 10:36 AM

Thanks...I'll give that a try.