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Anamorphically squeezed material to letterboxed- How good is AE at this?
I’m about to go to my film lab for the transfer of some super 16mm stuff from my new short film. I have the option of getting a letterboxed version, or an anamorphically squeezed version.
Apparently the reason some people choose letterboxed over anamorphic for super 16mm transfers is that unsqueezing the material to a letterboxed version is a task many NLEs, including FCP, do poorly. Apparently you end up with artifacts and some other weird issues, like losing every 4th line of resolution. Thus I was advised to do a letterboxed transfer if my movie would be seen in mostly from 4:3 media such as Beta SP tapes to avoid these issues, and only to do anamorphically squeezed transfers if I was sure I’d end on on DVD more often than not.
Then I was told that After Effects does a pretty much flawless letterboxed version from anamorphicly squeezed material and thus an anamorphic transfer makes more sense. I have no experience with this myself and do not not currently own AE to try it out. But I was hoping someone here would have some insight or experience in this regard.
So thank you ahead of time for any help! -
6 Replies
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Well assuming I understand you right, It would be best to get the anamorphic version because you would have more resolution to work with when essentially you would be down converting to an NTSC frame size in AE with a 16:9 matte rather than a 16:9 crop. This method allows better sub pixel accuracy from the frame resize interpolation.
If this doesn’t quite make since perhaps you could explain what footage you started with and how it was shot.
Andrew
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Hi Mus man,
AE does a pretty decent job of this kind of thing but the best way to do it is to create your letterboxed version by running it through a hardware Aspect ratio convertor. Snell&Willcox and Leitch both make excelent ARCs and most decent medium sized Facilities should have one. FWIW I think you’d be way better mastering your rushes and programme on to anamorphic, it’ll make the material considerably better value from an archival point of view. Also (in the UK at least)most broadcasters have an ARC in transmission so if you supply the prog anamorphic it just gets “squished” in TX.
HTH
Angus
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In Belgium we’re now required to deliver in DigiBEta Anamorph for all the major TV-networks, public and commercial.
They don’t accept letterbox and they certainly don’t accept 4:3 -
Hi Filip
I take it Belgium is all digital tx then? in the uk we’ve managed to make a royal hash of the switch-over so the analogue signal still gets broadcast 4:3. 16:9 content broadcast in the analoge realm is normaly squished to 14:9 which is a horrible compromise that some engineers came up with because some viewers complained about the size of the black bars when they watched a fully letterboxed 16:9 image. meanwhile in the digital realm that exists alongside analogue, material is broadcast FHA16:9 and unsquished by our digital set-top-boxes. confused? you should be 😀
Angus
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Thank you everyone for the help. Yes, my hope was to preserve as much of the resolution as possible by doing an anamorphic transfer. However, if it leads to poor letterboxed viewing, which would probably be how the film will be shown in festivals, then obviously an anamorphic transfer won’t make any sense.
I’m shooting super 16mm which is a 1:1.66 aspect ratio I believe. My DP advised cropping it further in post to 1.85. This would still result in some bars on a 16×9 (1.78) TV, but would preserve more resolution I would think if I did an anamorphic transfer. Not sure if any of this makes a difference to my situation though.
I probably won’t have the money after production concludes to do a hardware conversion though. So I was wondering, is the AE conversion really good enough, or does it lose every 4th line of resolution or have weird artifacts? Don’t supppose there are any examples online, are there?
Anyway, thank you all again for your help. -
Hi again musman,
I think AE would do an acceptable job but the workflow would be a nightmare unless your film is VERY short. Seriously I’d make a couple of calls baout the hardware conversion thing, it really shouldn’t cost more than a couple of hundred dollars at the very most (if you shop around) and would save you a lot of pain and give you a top quality product
Angus
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