Exporting Letterbox without Bars

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Robert,

The 1.4587 part of the equation refers to the PAR – Pixel Aspect Ratio. By making the pixels wider than they are tall, that is how widescreen video is “faked” with DV recordings. When converting to HD, you want to always use square pixels with 1.0 PAR.

720p video would be 1280×720 (1.0) or you could do 1080i or 1080p at 1920×1080. Not sure how well interlacing would convert from SD to HD and you might have to flip the field order possibly if using 1080i. Probably best to avoid an interlaced result, since any computer or web viewing should always be progressive anyway.

Any time you upscale SD to HD, it has the possibility to get ugly since there was not much resolution to begin with, so without specialized hardware or software for upconversion, you are just “blowing up” the image and it’s not going to look like HD, will be soft in comparison. To minimize the damage, maybe limit yourself to 720p since it will only look worse the more you blow it up.

Basically, start a New Sequence using a 720p25 preset, then drop your SD clip into that sequence, and use Motion > Scale to expand until it fits the frame. Now export as 720p and you have your HD version, no letterboxing.

What is the desired end result – how will video be viewed or distributed? Please note that a DVD player with hardware upscaling (via HDMI output) will provide superior results to blowing up to HD in Premiere. In that case, just make a DVD and be done. If you want to view on computers/online, then you can make the 720p digital file to share as .mp4 for example.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you very much, Jeff!

I tried the 720p sequence like you said but it came out with black bars above and beneath. I chose HDV 720p for the sequence (I usually use the DV PAL) and for the export I chose YouTube HD720p25. Didn’t work. Please tell me if you know why.

The video is destined for film festivals which accept either uploads or links to YouTube. I’d appreciate very much if you have another method.

BTW I tried this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKScVb7emQ But it didn’t work for me either.

Could you please advise me further?

Robert

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[Ann Bens]

If it is for festivals just export with black bars. YT will add the black bars anyways and so will probably the equipment use during the festival.

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[Jeff Pulera]

Your post said the video was “shot with letterbox”, but based on the pixel aspect that should be DV Widescreen, so the letterboxing should not be part of the recorded file. Perhaps you are working in a 4:3 sequence and that is adding the black bars from the start of the process?

Please provide a screen grab of the Export Settings panel, as this will also show the Sequence settings and that will tell us a lot.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Robert Gilbert]

Thanks, Jeff!
Here it is.
I noticed that the encoder gave me 720 x 576 which seems wrong ( I upscaled it a long time ago) but when I tried to move it up to 1344 x 1080 the encoder wouldn’t accept it, no matter what profile and level I tried it with.

I shot this using the “Letterbox” setting on a Panasonic DVX in PAL progressive. I was later told that that’s a fake 6/19 inside a 4/3 frame, so I’m hoping the extracted image (i.e., no bars) will be an acceptable aspect ratio for YouTube.

The Sequence setting for this trial clip (shown above) is D1/ DV PAL Widescreen 16/9. The sequence setting for the entire film is D1/ DV PAL. Which should I be using?

[Jeff Pulera]

I see nothing wrong with the image you posted – you have a DV Widescreen source in a matching sequence and there are no black bars. A perfectly lovely widescreen image. Are you saying that if you simply try to export as 720p25, that the resulting file has black bars then? And if you create a 720p25 sequence, and drop your DV clip into it, and maybe right-click and “Scale to Frame” that you still somehow end up with black bars? Can you post a screen shot of what happens, because this is not making sense.

And just to be clear, 720p HD is 1280×720 pixels and I apologize for even having to mention that, but you wouldn’t believe how many folks I deal with that think SD video (720×480 or 720×576) is “720p” because of the “720” in the size. Always look at the number on the right.

The reason the 1344×1080 doesn’t work is that one, it is not an acceptable/standard size for a video clip, and two, encoders can be kind of funny about what numbers they will accept due to the way video is compressed in blocks of pixels. If the encoder doesn’t like the math of the dimensions, it won’t work. As discussed earlier, the shape of the pixels (PAR) plays a role as well. Your source is anamorphic widescreen, the wide image being created with rectangular pixels rather than the image dimensions being 16:9 which they are not, but when you go to HD that uses square pixels (1.0) and then you do want the dimensions to be 16:9, and that works out for 1920×1080 or 1280×720 which are both a 16:9 ratio, and certainly not the case for 1344×1080.

Also as mentioned earlier, blowing up SD to HD doesn’t always look so great, so maybe what you really need to do is encode the video as SD with 1.0 PAR and try that for YouTube. Try this – start with an H.264 DV PAL Widescreen preset, and modify as follows:

• 1024×576
• 1.0 PAR
• Fields = Progressive/No Fields

You never want to put interlaced video (480i, 576i, 1080i) online since computers don’t do well with displaying interlacing which was meant for old TV sets. So anything you export for computer/web should be progressive.

How do we arrive at 1024×576? Divide both sides by 64 and you get 16:9 exactly. Widescreen video dimensions. When putting video online, you want to stick with 1.0 square pixels, because a lot of software video players do not look at the PAR and just assume square pixels, so if you encode a widescreen source at 720×576 with the very wide 1.4587 rectangular pixels, but then the player assumes the pixels to be 1.0 aspect square, your widescreen video gets squished in from the sides and will look more like 4:3 in the player.

Resources –

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-elements/using/aspect-ratios-field-options.html

https://www.miraizon.com/support/info_aspectratio.html

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

I’ve been going on and on about interlacing and now realize your source is already progressive, so that is good, stick with progressive on all exports as well. Sorry for the oversight

Thanks

Jeff

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you, Jeff.
* I tried the HDV 720p Sequence setting but the footage was rejected by the pop up. Seems like I need the PAL setting.
* I tried exporting using the settings you gave for the encoder but got the black bars.

[Jeff Pulera]

What pop-up rejects the footage, and WHERE specifically are you seeing these black bars. In what player, or YouTube, or where? What if you IMPORT the exported clip back into Premiere, how does it appear then?

Without seeing a sample of what you are exporting, hard to figure this out. In the Export Settings screen grab you posted, the image in the output window looked like a full-size widescreen image with no bars, and what that preview shows is what should get exported as well. So where do the black bars show up?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Eric Santiago]

One of those topics that drove me nuts especially with features at 2:35 etc…
In the end, I was told the black part, the projectionist uses to frame during playback.
I have not experienced this ever so please don’t take my word for it.
I just output what I’m told 😉