Converting 16:9 to 4:3 for letterbox delivery

[Tom Wolsky]

There’s no such thing as 4:3 High Definition.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Andy Mees]

Hey Steven,
Very gracious of you to post with the results of your own recent dilemma in the hope of helping out others in the future, I mean that sincerely. That said, I think you might possibly have led yourself astray along the way in your experimentation, and its important we try not lead others down the same path unnecessarily. According to your post, you delivered a 16:9 HD project as a letterboxed 16:10 file (at a greater than HD resolution)? That seems pretty unusual, was it per a specific delivery requirement? If not, then for reference, in my own experience delivering letterboxed usually means the original 16:9 (1.78:1) HD image shown within a 4:3 (1.33:1) SD frame, or perhaps cropping the image to a film aspect (like 1.85:1, 2.35:1 etc) within the original 16:9 (1.78:1) HD frame. This can usually be achieved most easily using Compressor’s geometry controls which includes presets for exactly such things. Gotta love easy 🙂
Very Best
Andy

[Steven Gladstone]

Tom and Andy, please forgive me for being unclear. I had to deliver an SD project in 4:3. Of course the client didn’t give the specs until after we had shot, and had done so in HD, wide screen. So I needed to turn in a letterboxed version in HD, for upload to DGFC, otherwise the graphics and framing would have been all wrong.

As far as the “easy” presets in compressor, couldn’t find them. everything seemed to either Squish or stretch the image. I did do a feverish search on the cow, but mostly saw posts about how someone was not going to take the time to explain how to do it, and I gave up the search (There was a great post about turning 23.98 to 29.97 in compressor – that was a life saver.)

I would love to know how to do it “properly” in Compressor, if you could share, as I know my workaround adds to the render time. Reading and following the Compressor help files, only resulted in either squished or stretched images.

Thanks.

Steven Gladstone
https://www.gladstonefilms.com

[Andy Mees]

Hey Steven

Still not entirely clear on the delivering 4:3 at beyond HD res thing but thats by the by 😉 … here’s how you’d do it pretty easily in Compressor.

I’m guessing you got as far as loading in your source clip and your settings preset so I’ll skip the basics and get straight to the geometry … for changing the geometry you need to switch the inspector window to the Geometry tab, change the Frame Size to the wanted result (so 1920 x 1080 would become 1920 x 1536 if you wanted to maintain the full resolution of the 16:9 original but change the ratio to 4:3) … this will cause your source to be stretched out to fill that new frame, which is not what you want, so you can simply set the Output Image Inset (Padding) (aka the letterbox) to use a 16:9 preset (which will calculate the actual pad values needed based on the already given Frame Size) so as to maintain the original aspect within the oversized frame. And thats it really, very simple in practice.

Best
Andy

[Steven Gladstone]

Thanks Andy, I appreciate it.

To be clear I had to deliver in Standard Def, Changing the Timeline settings to 1920 by 1280 was only an intermediate step. It got me to have the image letterboxed, and then when I sent the project ot compressor to deliver it, I scaled it to 720 by 480. I wasn’t delivering it in the “Expanded” resolution. It worked, but nowthat I know the better way, I won’t have to do it again. Thanks.

Steven Gladstone
https://www.gladstonefilms.com