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16:9 Widescreen to 4:3 Letterbox PROBLEMS
I can’t find an answer to this anywhere, so I hope someone here can help…
My setup: Video shot in true 16:9 widescreen NTSC DV format (720×480 at 1.22 pixel width). Let’s be clear here, this is real widescreen, not letterboxed/cropped 4:3.
My problem: trying to render the 16:9 image into a letterboxed 4:3 video
What’s happening: I’m getting a 4:3 video with my 16:9 image letterboxed in it, but I’m getting terrible combing/tearing/interlace artifacts
I’ve tried doing this so many ways, I can’t remember, but here are a few. First all clips were widescreen, my project was widescreen, then I rendered to 4:3. Next, I tried my clips widescreen, project 4:3, render to 4:3. Both techniques got me 4:3 video with my 16:9 image letterboxed inside of it, but the combing/sheering was god awful anytime there was horizontal movement in the frame. I also tried things like force resample and reduce interlace flicker, but still had problems. I think this has something to do with the combination of scaling my 16:9 image down in size to fit inside a 4:3 frame in combination with the interlacing. It’s as if the resizing is totally screwing up interlacing. Thing is, I want to keep it interlaced because eventually I want to render to 4:3 DVD MPEG2 format. Another thought I had was to render out to 30p widescreen DV essentially deinterlacing the full widescreen footage into a full render first. Then bringing that render back into vegas and then making project 4:3, thereby introducing the letterboxing AFTER I have deinterlaced the whole thing. After that, re-render out to interlaced NTSC again. But that seems overkill, plus I deinterlaced only to reinterlace which sounds like a bad idea.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated!!!!
Thanks…
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16 Replies
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May or may not help, but I’ve kept my widescreen projects as widescreen throughout – that is, Vegas project properties, render settings and DVDA project settings.
This way, when the video is played on a 4:3 TV, the TV does the letterboxing, and the pic looks fine. When played on a widescreen TV, it fills the screen.
Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au -
[Taynt3d] “My problem: trying to render the 16:9 image into a letterboxed 4:3 video”
Just out of curiosity, why would you do this? Would not rendering as 16:9 be fine and let the TV handle the letterboxing?
I can understand if you would like to “pan-and-scan” it, in other words zoom in on the video and edit it as pure 4:3, but I don’t understand why you would want to render as letterboxed 4:3.
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Why? That’s easy…
99% of the TV’s out there are 4:3. Now some TV’s are smart enough to letterbox widescreen footage but most are not. And DVD players are almost always able to letterbox the widescreen footage on there own. But sometimes you just need to go 4:3 for some reason. I mean seriously, how many letterboxed shows on standard def TV do you see these days? Discovery channel alone is probably half letterboxed widescreen videos these days. Trust me, I prefer end-to-end widescreen as much as the next guy. Anyway, I am able to get the letterboxing working in Vegas, but I get REAL BAD combing on horizontal motion, much more noticeable than if I just stay in its native aspect ratio. And I’m looking for someone who knows how to fix this problem of mine. Thanks!
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Many many films these days are produced on DVD in true widescreen. Never had a problem with playing any of them (it’s been my prefered format for years).
I’ve also yet to have a problem in producing a true widescreen DVD project. Have you actually experienced a problem with this? How about just for the heck of it rendering it widescreen all the way… and see what that looks like.
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As most have pointed out you are best to go widescreen the whole way but I understand your problem. I have had similar results on a couple of jobs where the 16:9 to 4:3 conversion was requested. I found the only way I could get a really clean conversion, looked as good as the original basically, was to use Procoder 2 which does a very good job of converting the 16:9 footage. I do the edit in the widescreen mode then render as a widescreen, next Procoder it to 4:3 letterbox and then DVDA it. If you don’t have access to Procoder then I can’t think of a guaranteed way you are going to overcome the problem. If you find an alternative solution please let us all know. Good luck!
Chris Young
Sydney -
OK, there’s the first real advice I’ve seen. Sounds like a decent plan. I have access to procoder, discreet cleaner, and sorenson, but I tend to use Sorenson for web compression stuff only. But I’ll give that a try because I have no problems at all with widescreen end-to-end. So I’ll render to widescreen DV, then let procoder take a crack at generating 4:3 DV letterboxed. Is that what you are saying?
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I think you missed my point. I MUST HAVE IT IN 4:3. Yeah, end-to-end widescreen is easy, it works, no problem, but that’s not my issue. I’m looking to solve a specific problem. Think VHS. Think client wants printed-to-tape MiniDV in 4:3 format. Think about all of the documentaries and shows you see on TV that are originated widescreen but shown letterboxed. There are a lot of reasons to need to do this.
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Taynt3d ~
Correct’omundo! You got it in one. We have found that Procoder does a very good job of converting the full 16:9 to a 4:3 letterbox. Well in PAL it does so I guess it should do the same in NTSC! The only time I can recall where we had a minor problem was with one clip which had a bit of a ragged line at the top of the vision/letterbox edge. This was fixed by using the ‘Advanced’ – ‘Video filter’ – ‘Crop’ options in Procoder. Good luck.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney -
I didn’t miss your point… because until now you didn’t make it. You didn’t mention VHS in your prior posts.. just DVD.
How do cable companies and the like take widescreen formatted content then? Is it not possible to produce a native widescreen format on tape. I think you CAN… as that is how you got it off the DV tape in the first place right? There are also many broadcast cameras (Digibeta etc) that capture in widescreen format to whatever tape they work with.
Still not understanding (other than VHS tape – and who uses that now anyway) why keeping it in widescreen format will not be the best way to go.
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Thanks mate…. cheers.
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