• Adobe Premiere Pro

  4:3 center cut in Premiere CS3

  Posted by Mike Dunn on January 27, 2010 at 1:55 pm

  I’ve seen the HD-to-SD downconverting question asked a few different ways, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.

  I have footage shot in HD (1080i60 16:9) on a Canon AVCHD camcorder. It should’ve been shot in 4:3 SD for air on a local SD cable channel, so we need it to end up that way. So what I ultimately want is a 4:3 center cut in 480i of the 16:9 footage.

  The closest I can get in Premiere is 4:3 letterboxed (using the Scale to Fill Frame feature). Preferably I’d like to have the raw footage downconverted before importing into Premiere (since my machine isn’t the beefiest) using, say, Handbrake, but that adds another layer of complexity that I’m not real familiar with.

  Is there a straightforward method of doing this in CS3? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

  Jeff Pulera replied 16 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Jeff Pulera

  January 27, 2010 at 3:48 pm

  In the Effects panel, use Motion to SCALE the video, I believe 133% is the number you are looking for, in any event, just scale up until video fills the 4:3 frame. Sometimes scaling will lop off the top of someone’s head, or you may need to pan the image left or right and you can use the X and Y adjustments as necessary to correct. Use keyframes to change this positioning over time if different scenes need different framing.

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers

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