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Letterboxing.
hey guys. how do you guys letterbox your videos( black bars on the top and bottom of your videos). what i do is go to cropping section of vegas and adjusting the height and width of my video. but when i render it, the black bars doesn’t show up in my tv. why is that? any tips? thnx!
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5 Replies
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Why would you want to letterbox your video? Are you trying to make the aspect wider than 16:9? Or are you trying to letterbox 16:9 in a 4:3 frame? If it’s the former, you would have to either adjust your project dimensions to be the true aspect you want to achieve so that Vegas will letterbox during render to 16:9 (i.e., make the project wider than 16:9) or you could simply add a black letterbox mask to the top track of your timeline.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Your TV could be stretching the image to match the screen dimensions. Too many people, including videographers who should know better, think there’s something wrong with their TV if they see letterboxing or pilars on the screen, so they turn on the “stretch” mode.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
My camera already shoots 16:9 video. I just want to make it the Hollywood style where there is black bars on the top and bottom. So I do it just by putting black bars (solid colors) on the video or by adjusting the height on the event pan/crop ?
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> I just want to make it the Hollywood style where there is black bars on the top and bottom
Do you mean that you want to use the 2.39:1 Academy aspect instead of the 1.78:1 (16:9) that your camera shoots? Did you frame for this aspect while you were shooting? Did you edit for this aspect? This is not a decision that you make after the fact. This will crop the video and possibly crop peoples heads off or other action needed in the scene. You will need to go back and re-edit your whole movie to make sure that you didn’t crop anything important.
There are three major ways to do this:
(1) The correct way: Shoot with grease marks on your camera monitor to ensure that all of the action stays within the 2.39:1 aspect. (this is how Hollywood does it). Then set your project properties to 1920×803 before you edit (this is 2.39:1). Crop all of the video footage to 2.39:1. I would make a preset for this in Pan/Crop by temporarily disabling Lock Aspect Ratio and set the crop to 1920×803. Apply this to all of your 16:9 media. Finally render to 16:9 and Vegas will add the letterboxing for you during render.
(2) The hard way: Shoot for 16:9. Set your project properties to 1920×803. Crop all of the video footage events to 2.39:1. Go through the entire project and adjust the crop up or down to make sure that you don’t cut out important parts of the video (like people’s heads). Render to 16:9 and Vegas will add the letterboxing for you during render.
(3) The quick and dirty way: Keep your project 16:9. Add a letterbox mask to the top and bottom of your project or drop your project into another project and crop to 2.39:1 to add the letterboxing. Then render to 16:9 and pray that nobody’s head got cut off (unless your movie is about The 6 Wives of Henry the 8th ;-D)
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
When you crop, you can always adjust the main movie up/down behind the crop bars.. So you can avoid unfortunate clipping in top/bottom. 🙂
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