-
Crop 4:3 to 16:9 in Premiere Pro CS3
Hey all, great forum. I’ve been learning lots in here.
I’ve been working on a project in Premiere Pro CS3. My project settings are set to DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2) and most of my footage matches this aspect ratio, unfotunately we had to switch cameras at somepoint and the person shooting the video couldn’t figure out how to get it to shoot in widescreen, but he said I could just trim it in Premier (but of course doesn’t know how to do it).
So some of the footage is in D1/DV NTSC (0.9) 4:3. All I would like to do is bring this footage in and crop it on the top and bottom and use the full width of the video.
If do a Interpret Footage and change it to widescreen it stretches it to make it widesceen, but it distorts the video which is obviously not what I want. I want to use the full width of the full screen video and just lose the top and bottom of the frame.
I tried using the Crop in Video Effects, but it seems very clunky to me. It only seems you can eyeball the crop and it doesn’t seem very accurate. Also it doesn’t fill the screen after I do that. I can scale it up after that but I seem to lose quality doing that.
This would seem to me to be a very common situation and I’m surprised a high end product like this doesn’t have a easy way to accomplish this.
Thanks for any help on this.
DUSTO
-
2 Replies
-
The “easiest” way to do this is to scale up the clip and use a matte to mask the top and bottom. There is a template in the titler for exactly that purpose.
As you have discovered, scaling a clip up has to create extra pixels which causes a drop in quality. You could try After Effects for a slightly better scaling quality, but don’t expect miracles. 😉
Cheers
Eddie -
The bottom line: If you want to bring 4:3 into 16:9, you will lose quality. What you need to do is scale up, and pan on the image up or down in order to frame the shot. Keep the PAR at .9. You may actually need to keyframe the pan as well if the framing changes.
The guy who made that mistake was obviously trying to soften the issue telling you there is an easy fix, and giving you terms like triming which mean nothing here.
My guess is he won’t be on your crew anytime soon 🙂
Cheers,
Vince Becquiot
Director | EditorKaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up