I have letterbox footage – what setting should I use in Vegas?

[Gary Kleiner]

You would use the normal 4:3 setting and perhaps change settings on your DVD player and/or TV to zoom in.

Gary Kleiner

[Janet Turner]

Gary –

Thank you for getting back to me. If I am using DVDA for my authoring program, would I save the footage as a DVDA Architect video stream and also check the box that says to stretch the video to fill the frame?

Grasshopper

[Gary Kleiner]

If your media is really 4:3 with a mask, then it can only be seen as 4:3 by the computer.

You might try to create a widescreen project which makes it seem squished horizontally, then strech it using the DVD and or TV settings.

Let us know how that works out.

Gary Kleiner

[Liam Kennedy]

If I’m not mistaken the letterbox mode in the DVX100A merely masks the top/bottom of the frame to produce a widescreen looking image. The result is the frames that are captured are 4:3 ratio but with embedded black bars top and bottom.

Now… you want to be able to display just the “video” part of the frame (minus the top/bottom bars) on your widescreen display.

The only way you can do that is to set your project properties to widescreen – and to physically crop the media to widescreen format. There will be a quality hit to doing this… but then I would imagine that will be acceptable as you decided to lose the resolution in the first place by choosing the letterbox mode in the DVX100A.

When you render for DVDA you will of course need to choose the DVDA NTSC WIDESCREEN format – and also choose the same widescreen setting in the DVDA Project Properties.

[Janet Turner]

Liam –

Yes, I knew about the masking and lost pixels when I shot this. I am shooting a very close up of a waterfall to slow down in post – the surrounding footage was not important. The camera is new to me so I am trying out the different settings. I know not to shoot in squeeze mode due to the way the image is digitally processed but I thought I would give letterbox a shot. I am getting the impression I should just leave the camera in the 4:3 shooting mode unless I can afford to buy the 16:9 adapter for $800 – not likely at this time.

Thank you your imput on the processing the footage in DVDA. The shot is not very long. I think I’ll try your suggestions and see what happens.

Grasshopper

[Janet Turner]

Gary –

I’ll let you know what happens on this short project (see my answer to Liam below).

Grasshopper

[Terje A. bergesen]

Are you sure the DVX100A adds black borders top and bottom? If you create a 16:9 aspect ration project in Vegas and put the footage on the time-line, are the borders still there? If they are not, the DVX uses the same method as other higher-end Panas to create the 16:9 aspect ratio, and you should edit in 16:9.

[Janet Turner]

Terje –

According to my DVX100a manual, the only way to get true 16:9 footage is through the use of the adapter so the footage is really shot in 4:3 with black borders. Thank you for responding to my post.

Grasshopper

[Terje A. bergesen]

No worries mate, I was just surprised considering the fact that significantly cheaper Panas shoot in true 16:9 without an adapter. Good luck wity your project.