best way to letterbox a project?

[Shane Ross]

Anytime you add a filter…and render…you lose a little quality. But seriously…not enough that unless you are projecting this onto a theatre screen, you will even notice.

The easiest way would be to nest the whole squence and then apply the 16×9 filter…and render. But, unless all your clips are framed for this, you might get some odd framing, so you might have to adjust them.

But I don’t know your footage.

Cropping, adding black clips, making a garbage matte or just adding a filter will all degrade the image slightly…and probably in the same amount. Again, something you won’t really notice.

[Tom Wolsky]

All of the functions you mentioned are effectively crop functions. The widescreen filter is just a way of setting preset crop sizes. Another way is to make a a widescreen graphic with transparent center in Photoshop. I like that method a lot as it lets you do creative things with the banding area.

[Andy Mees]

i’m biased towards method 2:

use a Letterbox Matte generator, add it to a new video track, adjust the framing of each clip using the standard motion tools (turn on Image + Wireframe and then just drag the clip in the canvas)

i’ve not seen any quality issues with this, and for my workflow have found it by far the quickest method.
essentially, items 3 and 4 in your list are a longer way around of doing the same thing.
you could also create a letterbox matte in Photoshop and use that.

you’re very welcome to use the Letterbox Matte generator i’ve been using, open up the FXBuilder [Tools>FXBuilder], then cut and paste the text below… create it [FXBuilder>Create Plugin…] give it a name, and save it into your /Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins folder.

if you’d prefer i’ll just email it to you

cheers
Andy

// —————-
// Plugin Text below
// —————-

scriptid “Andy’s Letterbox” //DO NOT LOCALIZE
generator “Andy’s Letterbox”, 120;
group “Matte”;
AlphaType(kblack);

input fillcolor, “Color”, color, 0, 0, 0, 0;
input letterboxWidth, “Size”, slider, 25, 0, 100 detent 25;
input letterboxOffset, “Offset”, slider, 0, -100, 100 detent 0;
input invertAlpha, “Invert”, checkbox, 0;

InformationFlag(“dontEraseDest”)

code
exposedbackground=1;

float width, height;
point poly[4], centerpoint;

boundsOf(Dest, poly);
centerOf(poly, centerpoint);
dimensionsof(dest, width, height);

scale(poly, centerpoint, 1, (100-letterboxWidth)/100);
offset(poly, 0, (height * letterboxWidth * letterboxOffset) / 20000);

image matteBars[width][height];
channelfill(matteBars, fillcolor.a, fillcolor.r, fillcolor.g, fillcolor.b);

fillpoly(poly, Dest, kwhite);
channelCopy(Dest, Dest, KAlpha, KNone, KNone, KNone);

if !invertAlpha
InvertChannel(Dest, Dest, 1, 0, 0, 0);
end if;

channelCopy(matteBars, Dest, KNone, KRed, KGreen, KBlue);

[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you all first of all. I did some more tests and found some interesting results. Andy, thank you so much for taking the time and giving me your recipe. I was able to use your method and create your letterbox plugin. It was a little tricky as my Mac has my mom’s name as the user and my name under FCP, so I had to save the file to the desktop then copy it into the plugins folder (after typing the password to give authorization). As a sidenote, I’d love to set things up so authorization like this was disabled, but one thing at a time. Anyway, the only problem I ran into with Andy’s plugin is it seems to be a 16×9 and I was looking to letterbox to 1.85. I should have mentioned that earlier, sorry.
I did render the whole project using the letterboxer plugin as described in option #2 and tested it against adding FCP’s letterbox filter (set to 1.85) to each clip. On my 1.42 Mini with 1 gig ram option #2 rendered in 21 min 38 secs. Adding the filter to each clip rendered in around 16min 20 secs. Also, I’m doing all this work using my “offline” dv25 versions of the material and will later do an online with my uncompressed 10 bit digibeta material. I’ve tested adding the 1.85 filter to each clip substituting the 10 bit stuff. Everything seemed to work fine. So, I’m thinking I might be better off just adding the filter to each clip, that is unless someone can give me a strong reason why I shouldn’t do things this way.
Thanks again for the help!

[Andy Mees]

Hey mus man

thanks for posting your render timings, thats good info to bear in mind.

fwiw my plugin is not at all sophisticated re the letterbox’s aspect ratio … its preset at a purely subjective value based on what our producers tend to like best when obscuring subtitles in their promo’s. its just a slider to change its size. i dare say i could add a menu selection for standard aspect ratio’s or make the ‘size’ slider snap to those particular values but its not a real priority for my own needs

anyway, glad it worked for you even if it didn’t win the render bake-off

cheers
Andy

[Sunny Sawrav]

Why don’t you try sending the project to Compressor? 🙂
After you’ve edited your project and are ready to render it out, go to File -> Send To -> Compressor

There, select a setting that best suits your render output or right click on a setting to duplicate it and tweak it to suit your needs.

You can tweak the settings in the Inspector Window.

Coming back to letterbox, there’s a tab called ‘Filter’ in the Inspector Window. Click that tab and scroll through the given filters. One of them would be Letterbox. There are presets you can use or define a custom setting. 🙂

Cheers.

[Jared Masters]

great generator, but on a widescreen display (such as a macbook or plasma TV) there are black bars on the right and left side of the screen. Only on a “square” TV does it appear correctly. Is there any way to fix this, without stretching the image, to have it fill the whole screen from left to right as regular 16:9 format would?