16:9 ratio

[Jerry Hofmann]

It’s shot anamorphically, so that’s when it’s made. You can turn on the anamorphic checkbox after you’ve captured though, so it doesn’t really matter which way you capture it. but if it’s anamorphic it will be 16:9 and not distorted when that checkbox is on.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann

Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.

[Herb Sevush]

[Russ Carlin] “I’m editing some footage at the moment in 16:9 ratio and was just having a look at my settings and saw that anamorphic isn’t ticket. I ticked”

HD is 16×9 and NOT anamorphic, it’s the natural aspect ratio. Anamorphic is most often used trying to squeeze a 16×9 picture out of the 3×4 area of a Standard Def image.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Steve Eisen]

[Herb Sevush] “HD is 16×9 and NOT anamorphic”

Not true. It’s all based on the camera sensor. The P2 camera I have, HPX-500 has a native sensor of 960×720. When dropped into FCP, it detects the footage and stretches it to 1280×720.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Russ Carlin]

I used a JVC 750e.

Is letterbox the same as anamorphic?

Carrrrrrr Carrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Herb Sevush]

[Steve Eisen] “The P2 camera I have, HPX-500 has a native sensor of 960×720. When dropped into FCP, it detects the footage and stretches it to 1280×720.”

DVCPRO HD uses all sorts of tricks to generate a 16×9 image but it’s not considered an anamorphic format. If you check your sequence settings you’ll see that anamorphic is un-checked.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Bret Williams]

But it isn’t anamorphic in the eyes of FCP. It’s still just HD. One of the many flavors of HD, but not anamorphic. Anamorphic only applies to SD material in FCP.

[Bret Williams]

Nope. Letterbox is, well, lets just say a very poor choice. There is no reason to ever shoot letterbox. Letterbox means you simply decided to record 2 bars of black instead of actual picture. So, instead of squeezing 854×480 into a 720×480 space, you squeezed it into 720×360 space. Now, to play back on a 1920×1080 screen it has to enlarge the image 300% to fill the screen instead of 225% (plus some horizontal stretching).

[Herb Sevush]

[Russ Carlin] “Is letterbox the same as anamorphic?”

Letterbox is a description of what happens when you put a complete 16 x 9 formatted picture into a 3 x 4 formatted frame (or anytime you put a mismatched format into another without cropping) – the result is a frame with black on top and bottom to fill out the image. Your other 2 options when dealing with mismatched formats is to center crop, that is just use the center 3×4 area of the original 16×9 image and get rid of the rest, or to squeeze it anamorphically. This last choice means you squeeze the image while encoding and then unsqueeze it during playback. This uses the whole 720×480 area of the Standard Def frame to playback the 16×9 image. It’s much higher quality than letterboxing but requires both encoder and playback to be able and aware that you are going anamorphic.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Joseph Owens]

You could argue that 1440×1080 was a kind of anamorphosis.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Herb Sevush]

[Joseph Owens] “You could argue that 1440×1080 was a kind of anamorphosis.”

And you would be right. You can also argue that since DVCPRO Hd is 960×720 and stretches out to 1280×720 it’s anamorphic as well. These are interesting technical arguments, but the thread was about helping someone figure out what to do and in the world of FCP both of these formats are not anamorphic because they don’t use the
anamorphic checkbox in the sequence settings. So when in FCP all HD formats are non anamorphic. And that’s not an argument but a simple workable fact.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf