Do you mind sharing how you did this? Did you use pan & crop to change to 16:9 ?

The important thing to note, is that you are rendering your 4:3 image WITHIN a 16:9 frame, hence the black bars. So do not stretch your 4:3 image to fill a 16:9 frame, you will either distort the image or cut some off it off, depending on you do it.

I set the Project and Render Properties to 16:9 and made sure there were black bars on the side. If not, I set the aspect ratio of each of the clips individually to 16:9.

I've seen tools or scripts that I believe do it for you, I did the old fashioned way, by hand (manually). It took me many months to, I did it over time.

One more note, I couldn't go back 20-30 years and change 4:3 photos, but for the last couple of years, all photos are cropped to 16:9 before they are put on the Vegas timeline.

Rich

Is there any loss in quality?

As long as you don't zoom in to fill the frame (i.e. to get rid of the black bars), there will be no loss in quality.

Mike

I'm at a loss as to why you would do this. If you render as 4:3 then wouldn't it show the same?

I assume you are burning a DVD.

The reason you would do this is so people who are watching your video on a 16 x 9 TV, and don't want to change aspect ratios (or don't know how), will still see a 4 x 3 image in the correct aspect.

Otherwise, it will be stretched horizontally.

Dave T2

....and don't want to change aspect ratios (or don't know how)

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I didn't believe this until I saw it for myself. I still shoot a lot with my VX2000 (I love that thing) and when I was at a friends house for a showing of something I shot for them, he showed the video on his 50 inch LCD TV Full Screen. So I changed it to 4:3 for him because of course everyone looked squatty. He was insisting it be left Full Screen because he couldn't stand looking at the pillarboxing until most of those in the room objected. Then it went back to 4:3. I haven't tried editing and rendering in 16:9 with that camera. Do you really think it would help?

John

I know this is all personal preference but . . . . . .

I personally cannot stand to watch 4x3 material artificially stretched to 16x9 making everyone fat and squatty (I'm fat and squatty enough without the extra help :-) )

At the station, I deal daily with viewers who complain about this very topic, and there is no clear cut answer. (it's squashed, it's too small, what's those black bars, how come the weather guy looks fat, etc). There is still a giant boatload of 4x3 TVs in service.

For short form material, there are easy ways to make the side bars look more aestetic (motion or static backgrounds, blurred copies of the 4:3 video stretched behind the main video, etc)

For longer form stuff, historical material, family vides. etc, where years later people would like to see the events as they actually were, I've produced both a 4x3 version and a 16x9 version (with side pillars) on the same DVD with a menu to select the preference.

One other thing I've started experimenting with is to use the side space to add text information, like event dates, comments, etc, so that the 4x3 video is unstretched on a 16x9 set, but there is something of interest in the former black bar area. I've done that by shifting the 4x3 image to the left side of the screen and using the right side for the text. I'll know better how this works once I get some family history stuff done this winter for Christmas gifts. People might hate it!

Tom

If the DVD player and HDTV are set correctly, a 4:3 render should automatically format it self with pillarboxes on the sides. With HDMI connections this can't be messed up. It's the people with simple AV, s-video, component or DVI connections that always seem to get it wrong. Fortunately HDMI is becoming very common so usually your ok as long as your software gets the flags write (which DVDA does).

When I render 4:3 I usually put it against a plain grey background, bring down the size a little with pan/crop to avoid any off screen stuff and put a shadow on the track. If the capture is bad and there is black 'noise' around the outside, I often also add a thin border, black or white to hide them.
The result takes a little more time to render but my clients like the final look. The smaller size also helps make the image look a little better if the original quality is not good.