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Aspect Ratio Confusion
Hello all, I hope someone can shine some light on my dilemma.
I’m going to compositing a project with green screen shot live action elements. These elements will be dropped in After Effects 3D space and animated
in a 2D/3D world with illustrations and a BG etc… The final render will be delivered in standard definition. We’ve convinced the producer to shoot the elements in HD. This way we can use the live action elements in a standard definition comp and scale and push past them in 3D space without having to worry about resolution issues. The producer has requested that we deliver a 16X9 version and a 4:3 version of the spot. My question is: witch format should I design the
spot in? 16:9? or 4:3? I was thinking I could crop the 4:3 version to letterbox but this wouldn -
4 Replies
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If you cropped the 4:3 using a letterbox you can crop it to any ratio you want. However the big question is resolution. The important thing to understand is resolution. An aspect ratio without considering resolution is just an artistic question of the shape of your window to your image and how you frame up for it. But in this case the question needs to be why do they want it 16:9? For the artistic framing or for broadcasting in 16:9 or 16:9 DVD’s?
Because even though in my job we always shoot film (which has a native resolution of quite a bit higher than HD), we still broadcast to a 4:3 Standard Def medium. And when we talk of doing it “widescreen” by shooting it 16:9 (1.78:1) or 1.85:1 or even 2.35:1 it’s all intended to be letterboxed in the 4:3 world. Why? Just for a better framing. My point is, you can’t answer your questions accurately unless you know the exact reason why. If they want a higher resolution for a widesreen broadcast, then I would work in a 16:9 comp and do a 4:3 crop of that output (By dropping the 16:9 comp inside a 4:3 comp and reframing). If it’s just for a widescreen framing, then I’d just letterbox it.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Cover your bases. Build everything in a 16×9 comp, but keep all of your important action in the center of the comp, make sure text on titles and other important elements are also within this area.
When you’re all done, you can then create an empty 4×3 comp, drop the 16×9 comp you built into this 4×3 comp. Select the 16×9 comp layer and press ctrl-alt-F to fit to frame. Press S to bring up your scale properties of the layer and click off the chain. Then copy/paste the width or height percentage into the other value depending if you want a center crop (keeping vertical resolution but losing the sides) or letterboxing (keeping the width but losing some res).Erik
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Building everything in 16:9 is much smarter. In addition to the reasons the others have given, a horizontal crop does not cause any field issues. This may become relevant if the footage at a later point needs to be re-edited or integrated in another project and it only exists on tape because the original media files are long gone.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Love this last post, its a great diplomatic way around it. All of these posts have been most helpful guys!..
Thanks a Ton!Adam
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