still-shot letterboxing question

rmhurt wrote on 1/20/2002, 6:51 PM

I imported a jpg image and VF2 put a black vertical letterbox around it, which I expected.

First, is there a way to change the color of the letterbox? Seems like there should be but I can't stumble across it...

Second, I would like to start the still-shot video by zooming in on the still-shot and then zooming out to normal size. I can easily do this using the pan/crop function in the Event FX (cool!). However, the zoom in restricts itself to the letterbox, so the letterbox still appears even tho I'm way zoomed in on the picture. Do I have to resize the original jpg image before importing - someone in this forum suggested 655x480 for NTSC DV projects - or is there a way to eliminate the letterbox after importing the image?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Comments

wvg wrote on 1/21/2002, 8:20 AM

If your going to make a serious slideshow from still images I would suggest you first make them all the same size and touch them up in a full blown graphic application like Photoshop as a first step. If that's a little too rich for your blood you can get a Windows port of GIMP for free, which is a Linux based clone of Photoshop. As long as you have your preferences setup correctly there won't be any letter boxing IF the images you use are the same size or greater than the selected frame size of your project. Remember that if you plan to play your project off a TV, most will cut off roughly 10% due to over scan problems.