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How to Permanently Letterbox 16×9 Footage
I am editing a 1 minute TV Commercial that was shot 16×9. I’ve finished the commercial and saved it as both a 16×9 DV-AVI and an uncompressed Microsoft AVI but it needs to be permanently letterboxed. I then re-imported them into a 4×3 Premiere Pro Project and checked the setting so Premiere resizes it correctly. The problem is the result is very bad.
Premiere softens the image terribly when it imports 16×9 footage and resizes it into a 4×3 project. I thought that maybe the DV compression was the problem but even the uncompressed version suffers the same fate.
Is there a program I can send this footage to just for the purpose of letterboxing it that will do a good job of it.
A side issue. When I re-import the Microsoft uncompressed AVI into Premiere, Premiere recognizes that it is 16×9 footage, but if I try to import the same footage into Sony Vegas it does not recognize the 16×9 flag.
I’ve been getting very frustrated trying to achieve this one task without losing image quality.
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3 Replies
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I have had no quality issues reducing the frame from a 16:9 to fit into a 4:3 letterboxed.
When you export, what settings are you using? What are you exporting to for final format? Or are you judging the softness from within Premiere Pro?
Steven
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1 / After Effects 6.5 Pro https://www.stevengotz.com
Learning Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 https://www.lynda.com
Contributing Writer, PeachPit Press, Visual QuickPro Guide, Premiere Pro 1.5 -
Your footage in the 16:9 project is anamorphic so it shows up “tall and skinny” on a 4:3 TV. Just create a new sequence in your 16:9 project and import the original sequence into this sequence. Then scale the new sequence to 77 vertically and you will have a letterbox output.
Ken Adolph
Media Group
Editor/Post Supervisor
https://www.mg.ca -
I did a test which simplifies the problem. I took various 16×9 anamorphic clips shot on a Panasonic at 30FPS and a couple shot on a Sony at 60fps and imported them into a 4×3 Premiere Project and re-saved the clips (as a Microsoft DV-AVI, lower field first). I put the same clips into Vegas and re-saved them as 4×3 lower field first. In both cases the clips are now permanently letterboxed.
I then put the new letterboxed clips into Premiere on top of each other and toggled one track on and off. It’s very clear that the Premiere Letterboxed AVI’s are much softer than the ones rendered in Vegas. At least by as much as if I had applied a Photoshop Blur filter to it.
This result I think is in line with the Event DV article on NLE’s when it said that HDV footage zoomed in Premiere gave poor results while the same done in Vegas gave very good results. In both cases Premiere is re-rendering footage to a different size.
The bottom line for me is that Premiere Pro is useless to do transforms which re-size pictures or putting picture in picture etc if you are critical about the resultant quality.
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