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4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio conversion
Hello Everybody
Here goes. I’ve got this material that was shot PAL DV in 4:3, but the client wants the finished project 16:9. Interestingly, all the shots have been framed for 16:9, so if I were to letterbox the 4:3 footage the shot composition would be better. The issue is mainly picture quality.
So, my two questions are
1. Does the final project need to be anamorphic to work on a 16:9 monitor? I can’t just letterbox the 4:3 footage, as it will looked squashed on a 16:9 TV, but I will need to crop the shots somehow so they’ll work in a 16:9 frame. Thinking about this too much gives me a nose bleed, any suggestions on the best way to do it?
2. As the material is dv, if I zoom in to fill a 16:9 frame the picture quality is going to be seriously degraded. To get around this, I was thinking of upresing the final sequence to an HD resolution, probably using the ProRes codec, and then treating it in Color. Grading and adding a slight blur maybe, then downresing back to SD. In my mind, this will be adding information to the picture therefore making the zoomed in footage look better in SD. Would that work, or am I deluded?
What do you all think?
Thanks. PJ
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6 Replies
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Leave it letterboxed 4:3. Every 16:9 TV set I’ve ever seen will zoom in on that 16:9 image to fill the screen with the picture left by the letterbox.
You shouldn’t zoom it up at all in FCP, and cropping it throws away 33% of the pixels… but that comes out looking better than zooming does. The TV sets do a better job of the zoom when you send it a 4:3 letterboxed image so let the sets do the scaling.
If you do #2 it will just cremate the image further. You should do the color correction, but do it and stay native the whole way. the LESS you recompress it, the better the end result. Uprezing doesn’t do any good whatsoever…. Only time to consider this is if you’re mixing SD with HD, and you must deliver HD. In this case you’re not doing that, so staying native all the way is by far the best practice.
Jerry
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You might consider building a 16X9 mask in Photoshop, import it into FCP, and put it in your sequence as the top layer. You can reposition your 4X3 shots behind the mask. Your sequence is still 4X3 – but it now has a 16X9 mask.
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FYI – this is a brilliant, free letterbox matte plug-in [real-time]:
https://web.mac.com/andymees/Free_and_Easy/main/Entries/2008/1/23_Andy%E2%80%99s_Letterbox_2.htmlI suggest everyone checks out the that and the other brilliant, free plug-ins Andy has there – many of which I use on a daily basis.
Wayne
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a new option i have jsut started using, is getting compressor to do the work. Motion can do the same thing but i could never get it to work how i want. See John Pale’s advice on compressor in this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1018706
Compressor uses a much better scaling tool, the results are much much better. But the rendering is wuite long and moving the image up and down in the frame for headroom wont be easy. But it is the most cost efficient way.
Nick
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Thank you for all the tips chaps. I’ll shall enjoy exploring the options.
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