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Letterbox due to wrong shooting settings
Hi All,
I accidentally set up my DBX100B with the wrong screen settings and ended up with a letter box and my picture being stretched. What my eyes show me is that it recorded 4×3 and was imported 16×9 but I’m not sure. I was wondering what is the best way to correct this without any/with the least amount of image being lost. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Attached is a still frame of the letterboxing.
Also I accidentally posted this in the basics forum a few hours ago – so it can be deleted there if possible – Sorry for the double post.
Thanks,
Mark
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6 Replies
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The best thing to do would be to recapture as 4:3. Shouldn’t be too bad.
If you toss out the media, it will go offline. Pop your tape into your deck or camera. Launch Log and Capture. Click Batch Capture.
Should go quite smoothly as long as you didn’t break timecode.
Rob Grauert, Jr.
http://www.robgrauert.com
command-r.tumblr.com -
If all you did was import it anamorphic sd instead of 4:3 sd, then it’s just a distort issue. The footage on the drive is identical in either case. Just uncheck “anamorphic” in the anamorphic column in the bin.
But the fact that you have lost 1/3 of your resolution when you shot letterbox, if that’s what happened, is pretty irreversible. It is more exaggerated. If you have to blow it up to fill a 16:9 frame, and then blow it up again to HD or display it on an HD LCD. In which case you’ll want to up rez it with hardware or compressor or AE or something. Not FCP.
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Bret,
I tried to recapture and it came in with those Bars in all the formats I tried so it seems to be a shooting error…
Any suggestions on how to go about it in Compressor. I don’t own after effects or any kind of hardware. I know in avid there was a resize function. On the positive side the web is our final outlet and we don’t have the best quality flash player at current so blowing it up isn’t the end of the world for this one piece. In order to get it to fit the frame I have to blow it up to about 130%.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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The bars are part of the image, the camera does not shoot 16:9, you can do a electronic conversion with the squeeze setting or letterbox setting gives you the 16:9 look but in a 4:3 frame. Most software solutions will soften the image, and depending on focus and exposure it can go really bad really quickly.
Taking the hardware suggestion a bit more indepth, I have had great success using a 2 AJA system. The footage is just capture as is (4:3) into System one via FW. Then System with a Kona Card plays the 4:3 footage out with a SD to SD conversion set to Anamorphic (this is removing the black bars). Then system to with a Io or any other SDI capture device is set to capture SD as anamorphic. These are the files you use. This will give you the best quality and it is super fast (real time of course).
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Ok, so you need to cut your losses. You shot letterbox 720×360. That’s all the pixels you have. And in square pixel format for computer/flash/QT, that equivalent size is 640×360. So, I’d suggest you go ahead and blow it all up 130% as you said. It really will look just fine in your flash or QuickTime for the web as long as it’s no larger than 360 pixels high. A little limiting these days, but it’ll do.
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considering your settings this is a long shot, but worth considering: in the browser have you looked to make sure that the “anamorphic” column has no check in it for the selected clip? like i said, probably not the fix, but a very simple one if it does work.
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