• Adobe After Effects

  changing the color of letterbox black bars

  Posted by Springfun on July 21, 2007 at 2:45 am

  Hi everyone,

  I’m currently editing a native 16:9 24p project. I’m going crazy trying to figure out a way to add a title on the actual letterbox black bars and/or to change the color of the black bars from black to red.

  example:
  https://tinyurl.com/2g9r8s

  Does anyone know how to do this in without cropping the image?

  I’ve tried enlarging the size of the comp and importing to a new time line and then adding a title, but when I render I get a bigger size file still with letterbox bars under and on the sides…

  Thanks a lot for your help!

  LK

  Springfun replied 18 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  David Franklin

  July 21, 2007 at 4:50 am

  Your problem is how you’re thinking of your footage. If you’re editing 16:9 native, there ARE no black bars at the top to put a title in. Imagine, for a second, that you’re going to hook a deck up to a wide-screen TV and play this footage back. The footage is going to fill the widescreen frame top to bottom and side to side. And then where are your bars?

  The black letterbox bars only appear on 4:3 sets when they’re displaying a 16:9 image. They aren’t actually part of the 16:9 image itself.

  So, for example, the clip you linked to on YouTube is not a 16:9 clip. It’s a 4:3 clip with 16:9 footage parked in the middle of it. So if you want yours to look like that, you’ll have to do the same thing.

  Make a 4:3 comp, drop your 16:9 comp into it, resize to fit comp width, and there you are.

  Once you’ve got “black bars” on the top and bottom, you can create a comp sized solid of whatever color, place it on a layer below your main 16:9 comp, turn it red, and there’s your red letterbox.

  The title works similarly. Just place it outside the original footage in the area designated as your “letterbox.”

  Hope this gets you where you want to go.
• 

  Springfun

  July 23, 2007 at 5:08 pm

  Hey Artisanal,

  Thanks very much for your post and help. Will implement!

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