export Cinematic image size

[Steve Roberts]

It’s all about your playback medium. It doesn’t make any sense to work in a format without a specific delivery or playback medium in mind. For example, if you want your piece to play on DVD in NTSC-land, it has to be delivered at 720×480, at standard non-square or widescreen pixel ratio. You have no choice. So if you want your image to be a different shape, you will see black bars around it. There’s no way around it, since DVD is a standard. The same goes for PAL DVD and Blu-ray.

The same goes for YouTube. Check their site for specs. If, however, you want to post on a website over which you have complete control, you can make the movie any shape you want, using square pixels of course. Just make the file size small enough to be playable.

If you want to deliver to film, talk to the film lab with whom you’ll be working, even before you set up your comp size. Tell them what you want, and they’ll tell you what they can do.

Now, after all that: 1) drop your footage onto the “new comp” button to make a footage-sized comp. 2) in that comp, make a new solid that’s the size of the desired film-like shape. Scale it to fit the width of the comp, assuming it’s not as tall as the comp. 3) set the transfer mode of that solid to “stencil alpha” and make sure it’s above everything in the stack.

Alternately, you could draw a filmic-shaped mask on the uppermost solid, set it to “inverted”, then adjust the opacity of the solid to get a semi-transparent mask.

[Todd Kopriva]

I agree with Steve. There’s some information here that fleshes out a lot of what he said: “Planning your work”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Freddy Mclennon]

Wel,

Tnx for the replies ;o)
Wel, usualy I plan my project very carefully so that won’t be a big problem.
and now I know how to do it in AE.
For the time beeing, my final output is DVD PAL Widescreen.
In the near future i’ll go to Blu-ray.
So I shoot my video in HD 1920×1080, and some footage in 720P (mostly to shoot 60fps to create slow-motion)
I aply effects and do the things I need to do in that shot.
Difference now is, I use a semi transparant ‘safe frame’ layer in this ‘cinematic image size’.(inspired by you guys)
Now I even have some room to adjust the position of the shot footage or apply some motion stabalization without having to worry about the edge of the image in my picture.
Once my shot is finished I render it out and use the ‘region of interest’ settings so AE will only render out that part creating a file in square pixel, 1280×540
Then in Premiere I import the files into a 720p project and do the editing. When I’m finished there, I render it out to MPEG DVD Pal Widescreen and tadaaa.
Yes, ofcourse I have black bars watching this on my 16:9 LCD screen.
But I have the seem look as a feature film …

So … tnx a lot for your help and advice

Freddy