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Pillarboxing
rom the tech specs. for a film festival
– For videos, we would like to screen in the aspect ratio of 16×9 (1.78). If your video is 4×3 or 1.66, you can have it
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5 Replies
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Im sure I didn’t explain myself enough. Because I don’t see this as simple at all.
I understand that everything gets pillarboxed. However the movie(with a 1.66 matte, btw) is going to be finished and projected from a Digibeta. I don’t want to put titles(150 subtitles not just credits) in FCP because they will look terrible when it gets bumped up to digibeta. Besides, I already have a color corrected TEXTLESS Digibeta.
Im going to have a Digibeta with titles with a 1.66 matte, now I have to do some sort of transfer to pillarbox it?
I understand I could do everything in FCP but the quality is going to suffer. And that would mean getting my color corrected Digibeta back into FCP somehow. You can see how it quickly becomes silly and expensive.
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“I don’t want to put titles(150 subtitles not just credits) in FCP because they will look terrible when it gets bumped up to digibeta.”
“I understand I could do everything in FCP but the quality is going to suffer.”
Someone has been feeding you some bad information. Why would the quality of the FCP titles look any different than the titles on a Symphony? Talking about silly and expensive! If you work in 10bit uncompressed in FCP the quality will be exactly the same as Symphony 10 bit. Just pull the Digibeta in via SDI though whatever capture card you want (Aurora Pipe, AJA, Decklink etc) and do the finishing title work yourself. We finish shows for broadcast and film all the time on FCP. For aspect conversions we use a hardware aspect ratio converter. However, if you don’t have that you can do all your work in FCP and render.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc. -
“Just pull the Digibeta in via SDI though whatever capture card you want (Aurora Pipe, AJA, Decklink etc) and do the finishing title work yourself. ”
Yeah, I don’t have 1) a digibeta deck 2)SDI (Aurora Pipe, AJA, Decklink etc) – just the standard Apple video card.
This is a very low budget project. The reason I’m finishing on Symphony is not bad information. It’s a free Symphony. The titles will look better than anything I can do on my system.
The problem is the requirement to pillarbox. It doesn’t seem like transfer houses here are set up do do anything like it. I’ve sent my specs around and they are scratching their heads. And I’m in Hollywood.
Does this even make sense? Im shrinking my movie down so that it can be blown up to fit a 16.9 screen…
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Dave,
What you said to do in FCP is pretty much what I thought of doing.
Except if you read the specs, they pretty much say not to do this.“- For videos, we would like to screen in the aspect ratio of 16×9 (1.78). If your video is 4×3 or 1.66, you can have it
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Aspect ratio translations are very confusing.
Since your Symphony is “Free”, take the time time to do a complete “round trip” test. Take a minute of your project, and test several of the workflow suggestions given above. I can’t stress enough the importance of doing this. There are so many pitfalls along the way in this process that the only way to confirm success is to actually do it. Don’t forget that many professional monitors have 4:3 / 16:9 buttons on them to change the display. Having the “wrong” button pushed will totally “undo” what you’re trying to accomplish.
Mark
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