cinematic aspect ratio

[Carlton Rahmani]

The rule I look at in terms of aspect ratio is 2.39 for your REALLY epic stuff. . .like Star Wars, English Patient, stuff like that. For other things, like short films due to their subject matter, I’d recommend 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
It’s up to you.
It’s convenient, too, since it’s close to 16×9, and you don’t have to worry about really thick black bars if you’re playing it on a widescreen tv.
To get the aspect ratio in Vegas, go to the project properties. I picked 2k in the template, then adjusted the pixels so the WIDTH is 2048 and the height is 1138.

[John Rofrano]

To get the aspect ratio in Vegas, go to the project properties. I picked 2k in the template, then adjusted the pixels so the WIDTH is 2048 and the height is 1138.

Assuming you are shooting HD, this will not give you the best quality because your source is only 1920×1080 so it will be resized to 2048×1138 and get softer.

A better approach would be to work down from the width of your video. 1920 / 2.35 = 817. Make your project 1920×817 and also crop each video event to 1920×817. This will make full resolution of the width that you shot without resizing.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Justin L.]

How ’bout if I’m working with 4:3 footages? I know I cannot put the same width and height because it will not match the other 16:9 clips. So what would be my height and width for a 4:3 footage?

And another question, how can I make all of my clips 2.35:1 without cropping every clip one by one?

Thank you!!!

[John Rofrano]

So what would be my height and width for a 4:3 footage?

You divide the width in square pixels by the aspect ratio to get the height.

For example: if your 4:3 video is 720×480 with a Pixel Aspect Ratio of 0.0901 (NTSC DV) then:

Step 1: First you need to calculate the width in square pixels by multiplying the width by the PAR.

720 * 0.9091 = 654.552 square pixels wide

Since we can’t have fractional pixels we’ll round this up to 655.

Step 2: Next divide this by the aspect 2.35 and you get:

655 / 2.35 = 278.723

which we can round up to 279.

This means that 4:3 converted to 2.35:1 is 655 x 279 PAR 1.0 or 720×279 PAR 0.9091.

And another question, how can I make all of my clips 2.35:1 without cropping every clip one by one?

You can crop one event and then select all of the others and copy and paste attributes but only do this is cropping is the only attribute you have changed.

You can also drop the entire project into another project as a nested project and then crop the one event that the nested project makes. This is the easiest way to do this after the project is finished. Then check to make sure you didn’t crop anyone’s head off. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Justin L.]

Thanks for the aspect ratio! I’ve been having troubles with the 4:3 footages and now I’m all good!

As for the paste attributes, wouldn’t that also paste the effects that I’ve put in that one video?

[John Rofrano]

As for the paste attributes, wouldn’t that also paste the effects that I’ve put in that one video?

Yes, that’s why I said: only do this if cropping is the only attribute you have changed. So if you added FX or anything else, I wouldn’t use this method.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com