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making an anamorphic dvd from footage shot 4:3 letterboxed with black bars.
Can you make an anamorphic dvd that will play on a 4:3 standard tv with the black bars, and also fill the entire screen of a widescreen tv with footage shot 4:3 letterboxed. I’m going to bring the footage into after effects and slice off the black bars and render the video out as a widescreen aspect ratio video. Will this work for making an anamorphic dvd, do I need to do anything about pixel aspect ration or composition aspect ratio or anything wierd to get this to work?
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4 Replies
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You can just drop you original footage into a DV Widescreen comp (with DV widescreen pixel aspect ratio).
Scale up the source footage to fit in the new widescreen comp, to where it fills the width and crops the black bars.
Render and make sure you set the appropriate anamorphic settings in the DVD authoring menu.
You’ll lose a bit of sharpness due to the blow-op, but other than that you’ll be fine. If you have a bit of budget you could take a look at ReSizer which comes as part of the Anarchy Toolbox, (www.digitalanarchy.com).
It offers a choice of multiple algorithms for scaling footage, some of them better than AE’s internal scaling.
Bar3nd
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Would I need to resize anything though? My footage, as of now, is 720/480, 4:3 footage with black bars at 16:9. The way I slice the bars off to make a native 16:9 image is by nesting my comp into a comp that’s dimensions are 720/365, then nesting that into a composition whose dimensions are 720/480 again. This gives me 16:9 widescreen again, but now my image is only 16:9 and the black bars are there because there is actually no video there, not because of a black overlay. Am I able to render this out as widescreen?
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Two things:
If you crop video to 720×365 (I’d pick an even number if I were you though!), and then place it back into an NTSC composition and render out, you’ll end up with exactly the same video. Whether it’s black because of the overlayed bars, or because of the visible background, makes no difference in this case. MPEG2 (DVD compression) doesn’t support transparency. Black is black.
Another thing. Anamorphic Widescreen for DVD means a 16:9 image squeezed into a 4:3 frame. So you’ll need to scale the video to fill the frame.
In short: there’s no need for doing what you propose: “replacing the black bars with empty pixels”. Also, it won’t result in an anamorpic widescreen DVD.
Bar3nd
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Do as Barend said in his first post.
effectively you’re scaling the video in height untill the black ‘falls off the top and bottom edges of the screen’.When you create your DVD indicate to the authoring program that the rendered movie is “anamorph”.
A DVD-player hooked up to a 4:3 TV-set will atomatically add black bars.
One hooked up to a 16:9 will display at full resolution.You’ll loose a little bit of clarity because of the initial scaling, so that’s the downside of not starting from anamorph footage.
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