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Whoops-one camera 16:9 the other 4:3
The kids were fiddling with a two cam music band shoot and one camera was set to 4:3 and the other 16:9. Both tapes are now captured in PP1.5. They know they can scale up and down in Premiere. Which is the preferred method? To scale the 16:9 to 4:3 or the 4:3 to 16:9???
Is there an alternative method to match the cameras?
They now know to synch and double check the cameras but they still need to make this project work.
Any advice woiuld be greatly appreciated.
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3 Replies
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The cams were both Panasonic DVC30. On was set to letterbox / 16:9
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Why not scale to whatever your output format is going to be?
Shame it was letterbox and not squeeze … a lot of the resolution is already thrown away in letterboxing. And how does a letterboxed vid look on a widescreen?
The Beeb likes material recorded and edited in 16:9, and then put through an aspect ratio converter to generate a 14:9 master for broadcast.
On a standard 4:3 screen, the viewer then sees a thin black bar top and bottom, and on a widescreen a thin black bar left and right – unless the screen’s auto adjusatment kicks in …
So a compromise for you might be to “blow up” your letterboxed footage to 14:9, and similarly shrink your 4:3 footage to 14:9.
Of course if you want the band to look skinny, you might prefer to stay with the letterbox format, mask on black bars to match top and bottom on the 4:3 footage and reposition it “pan and scan” style.
Yours is going to be a bit of a makeshift repair job whatever, so it might be as well to make a feature of it, stretch the pix to make them look how you like, and do enough picture processing to make sure the low-res look seems like an intended feature and not a shortcoming!
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I wouldn’t scale at all.
If you shot 16:9 letterbox, that means that the file itself is 4:3…with a letterboxed 16:9 image in the middle right?
I’d simply set up a black mask using photoshop of the titler that matches the black top and bottom of the 16:9 content and effectively “crop” the 4:3 stuff into the same visual space as the 16:9 letterbox. (probably will need some vertical repositioning to not cut the roof off of every 4:3 shot)
…if you wanted to push it a bit harder for effect, the new mask could make a harsher crop than 16:9 if you want and make it all “super” letter box…simply run the letterbox PSD or title document on a higher track than where you’re editing…like V10…that gives you nine visual tracks to play with and you don’t need to bother constantly messing with it.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net
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