16×9: keep it letterboxed or enlarge and anamorphic?

[Adam Taylor]

Michael,

David is right …i often have to do a very similar thing with TV commercials. I’m based in UK and all our output has to be 16:9 anamorphic or the broadcasters would reject it.
We often get 4×3 commercials from around the world that need to be converted. Its actually quite simple to do.

I have the timeline set to anamorphic and import the material. Then open the 4×3 file in the Viewer, first i open the distort twirldown and enter 33% into the aspect ratio setting. Then i scale up the size to between 130 and 135% – i tend to give myself a little leeway so i can judge the composition by eye rather than percent.

The good thing about this method is you can move the image up/down to frame the shot better (but not by a huge amount. And whilst you do loose a little in quality, you lose a lot less than you would by deinterlacing.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Michael Morgenstern]

I did some tests by resizing some sample footage in Motion and Final Cut, with very surprising results. The unresized letterboxed video was the highest quality, and the Final Cut resize was very slightly degraded. The Motion resize, however, was very much lower quality, blurrier. It’s possible that settings can be tweaked on Motion to resize more sharply…

For both I created a DV anamorphic document and resized the footage to 133%. I exported with highest quality in both, turning on field rendering.

I’ve uploaded some layered Photoshop documents so that you can see them. Two have been deinterlaced in photoshop so you can directly compare the fields. The letterboxed original has been resized vertically in Photoshop for easy comparison. Take a look if you’re curious!

Frame 38;13 interlaced: https://mjmfilms.com/3813_interlaced.psd
Frame 38;13 deinterlaced: https://mjmfilms.com/3813_deinterlaced.psd
Frame 18;12 deinterlaced: https://mjmfilms.com/1812_deinterlaced.psd

Cheers,
Mike

[Michael Morgenstern]

Alright, it’s been a few months and I’ve learned a ton on the subject since. This will be useful for you all to know, I think. I did the resize in FCP as suggested and the stair-steps were painfully evident. The thought of resizing an interlaced to interlaced frame was also just painful.
So I got Magic Bullet and used that software’s Instant HD package. It will do custom resizes as well as to HD, and uses the previous and successive frames to get a quality result. The resulting images have details in them that just didn’t exist beforehand.
Two downsides: one is the processing time. It took a full week of encoding, using two computers, to render my 46-minute documentary. I used frame mode which I would recommend, then you have to reconstruct the .mov Also, the plugin produces some bad frames with white flashes.
Take a look for yourself at the quality difference.
https://mjmfilms.com/comparison.zip
Cheers,
Michael