Recording Formats, Widescreen

Uniwoo wrote on 8/23/2006, 12:24 PM
I just bought a new camera, Canon Elura 100, which has a widescreen option. I haven't even used it yet, it just arrived today, but I'm wondering about mixing clips from my old camera which I'm getting repaired (I may still use it for traveling with my kid's sports events) if I shoot in the widescreen mode with this new one. I have Vegas 2.0 for editing.

Will I have problems mixing new clips shot in widesreen, and I should avoid using this option if I plan to mix them?

Thanks

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 8/23/2006, 9:14 PM
vegas 2??
id strongly recomend you update ASAP as the vegas engine has been totally rebuilt and refined... believe me, once u upgrade you wont look back
Uniwoo wrote on 9/9/2006, 4:37 PM
Thanks for responding, but I'm looking for a more technical response, not just to upgrade my software, i.e., like to set the aspect ratio to whatever? to accommodate the mixture,or something like that. Any ideas along those lines?
auggybendoggy wrote on 9/9/2006, 6:11 PM
yes you will have problems to my understanding.
but I'm probably wrong.

When vegas renders its an anamorphic style for widescreen 14:3
so it would stretch your normal video.....

I'm new to this myself and dont know the answer so
I'm bumpin :)

Aug
PeterWright wrote on 9/9/2006, 6:49 PM
To mix 4:3 footage with widescreen you either have to:

- letterbox - in this case vertical letterbox, so there will be black panels either side, which you can of course fill with any colour, gradient or graphic you like, or ...

- crop the 4:3 picture to fill the widescreen aspect ratio. This means cutting off the top and/or bottom and scaling the pic up somewhat, so there will probably be some quality loss.
Serena wrote on 9/9/2006, 7:37 PM
The simplest way for a native 4:3 camera to deliver 16:9 is by cropping the the vertical dimension of the image (360 pixels instead of 480). Thus cropping existing 4:3 to 16:9 would give a match in vertical resolution.
However reading a review of your camera indicates that things aren't that simple. While in 16:9 it does create images of less vertical resolution, they're better than simple cropping. "In 4:3 aspect ratio, the Elura 100 produced 538.2 lines of horizontal resolution and 287.7 lines of vertical resolution. In 16:9, the camcorder produced 599.1 lines of horizontal resolution and 259.9 lines of vertical resolution." So I presume the CCD is larger than required for 4:3 and in widescreen mode it employs a little more width (than 4:3). IF I'm correct, then cropping your new material to 4:3 (lopping off the sides) would give a good match to your older material. You could, as you realise, shoot in 4:3 until you start a totally new project.
If you want to start now in 16:9 and want to mix in 4:3 material, you will either have to crop the older stuff (enlarge 1.33x), letterbox it, or choose depending on the clip. I'd be inclined to letterbox whole sequences, but think that intercutting letter-box with 16:9 would be a bit jarring.
Serena wrote on 9/9/2006, 8:00 PM
<<Will I have problems mixing new clips shot in widesreen, and I should avoid using this option if I plan to mix them?

My response above is all very nice but does it answer your actual query? Not really.
Technically you can intercut 4:3 and 16:9 clips (you would set project properties to widescreen, since I'm presuming you want a widescreen output). So the question is really an artistic one, how will it look if you intercut different aspect ratios? It's quite commonly done in TV documentaries where they are using stock footage and the usual thing is to enlarge the 4:3 material, but less than 1.33x, so there is some letterbox black top and bottom. How much enlargement is possible depends on the image quality and the viewing conditions (not a problem if the image is viewed on an iPod).