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letterbox, aspect ratio and field order info
Hi.
I’m editing a short movie in APP2 and I have some basic questions.
The camera I used (JVC gydv300u) is a NTSC camera, and it’s the first time I work with NTSC. The short was filmed in 16:9, but the camera uses Letterbox, so when I capture the footage it as the black bars that turns a 4:3 picture into 16:9. So I created a 4:3 project, to include the black bars, but I want to cut them in the end. What is the best way to cut them and does this create any problems with the fields? How do I convert from a 0,9 pixel aspect ratio to 1,2 without any distortion?
What are the best definitions to export the final film, and then convert to mpeg2 and create a NTSC DVD? should I export to DV, bottom field first, PAR 0,9? -
5 Replies
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You might try using a 16×9 project. If the video shows up as 4:3 in it, you can stretch it to fill the screen, so the only part cut off would be the letter box.
As for DVD creation, I’ve always had good luck with exporting as DV lower field first, then encoding to mpeg2.
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I thought I could do that, but I think it would stretch the movie. If the original PAR is 0,9 and I create a 1,2 PAR project it would cause the video to be deformed, wouldn’t it?
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Well, it shouldn’t, because you’d be working with the same amount of screen area if you expand the full frame to fill the 16:9 frame, it should fit perfectly so the only part outside the frame would be the letterboxed bars.
I just tried it with a video I had onhand and it looked fine.. If you just drag the top (or bottom) middle anchor straight up (or down) it will maintain the aspect ratio and just scale to fill the frame. Since the frame width is the same, when you drag it into the timeline and it shows up with bars on the sides it’s actually scaled down. So scaling to fill the screen brings you back to full resolution. The difference in PAR isn’t really relevent because you’re talking about the same data…
The difference being that rather than shooting anamorphic initially you shot full frame. The benefit to shooting this way, especially if you were to shoot non-letterboxed full frame, and I would recommend shooting without the letterbox in the future, is that you can adjust your framing (vertically) in post on a scene by scene basis (or if you want to add a tilt up/down you could do that during a scene by incorporating motion keyframes)
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I’ll try your suggestion.
Shooting without letterbox, as you suggested, might be a good idea, but you must keep in mind the space reserved for the black bars, if you want a previously defined scene, like you do when shooting a movie. If you don’t have the black bars it’s easy to forget that the image height is smaller that you see.anyway, thanks a lot for the answers!
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Yes, it can be difficult to remember proper framing. It would be nice if all cameras had a setting to display frame border lines for various formats, so you could frame within them, but not record those lines to tape. Either way though, as long as you keep in mind that you are framing for 16:9, shooting full frame and cropping later has advantages.
Something helpful to keep in mind for that is to keep all the eye levels of your cast at about the same level, then even if you have to slide the image up or down to fit what you had in mind into the final picture, it should all fit nicely. This is even more important if you go with a wider screen picture, like the academy 2.35:1 ratio, otherwise you’ll end up having to cut off heads.
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