Conversion of 4:3 to 16:9

[Vince Becquiot]

It’s never an easy task to convert to 16:9, unless you shot for 16:9. You have to take in account the fact that you are losing about 30% of the vertical areas in your picture. That may mean losing valuable composition area, cutting heads, etc.

You could use various tools to move the picture down and keep it framed, but it’s not a weekend job if you want it to look good.

Now, if you get really good at it, your skills might be very valuable soon as HD comes in.

Some other methods include expanding the horizontal ratio to match the width. (I wouldn’t do it). That might be where “Does the camera make me look fat?” expression came from.

And converting to HD, well wouldn’t do you any good as far as quality goes, and it would in fact reduce it as you would have to recompress to a different format.

Sorry if that’s not the answer you were looking for.

Vince

[Steven L. gotz]

There are programs that are better than others at increasing the scale from SD to HD, but why in the world would anyone think that SD could look anywhere near as good as HD? Increasing 720X480 to 1280X720 or even 1920X1080, God forbid, means that the pixels have to be a lot bigger. So each one is now 4. Where are the new pixels to come from?

A similar issue comes about when making 4:3 look like 16:9. If you must combine the two, use 4:3 not 16:9. Or letterbox the 16:9 and mask the 4:3 to match. The only way to make 4:3 into the same size as your 16:9 is to zoom in. Once again, where do the new pixels come from?

I don’t mean to upset anyone, but reality bites. Shoot HDV or HD and edit HDV or HD. Shoot SD and edit SD. You might even shoot HDV and edit SD until your tools catch up with your desire.

What is it they say about teaching a pig to sing? It wastes your time and annoys the pig. Making SD into HD just isn’t a worthwhile effort unless it is the only possible way to mix a little SD into a lot of HD.

Just my $0.02

Steven
https://www.stevengotz.com

[Ronnie]

I have a similar problem. A while back I shot some footage in 4:3 by accident.
All the other footage is shot in anamorphic mode with the Canon XM(GL)-2.
It’s a couple of minutes long and will probably be around 10-20 second in the finished movie.

Now, I know I will lose some resolution/picture quality, but wich would be the best way to make it match the 16:9 footage?
Zoom in? And in that case, how much?

[Vince Becquiot]

Basically zoom in until you lose the black on each side. Depending on the footage you can also try to stretch horizontally a little to compensate.

Vince