Mixing 16:9 (widescreen) with 4:3

[Matt Crowley]

If you just drop the 4:3 file into a 16:9 project, it will be pillarboxed (black bars at sides).

You can easily crop the top and bottom off the 4:3 video using pan/crop – right-click the 4:3 event(s) and click pan/crop, then right-click on the video frame in the pan/crop window and select “Match output aspect”. That’ll exactly crop to match the project format.

Cropping like this may cut off useful parts of the video though. You can adjust the position of the crop up or down to optimize the cropping, and even add keyframes to adjust the crop position over time.

If you can’t afford to lose any of the original frame, then you’ll have to live with some sort of pillarboxing – maybe you can disguise it with some overlay graphics to fill in the edges.

[John Rofrano]

One trick to make the pillarboxing more acceptable is to duplicate the 4:3 video on a track below and crop it to 16:9 as Matt suggested and then add a Gaussian Blur until it’s just a smooth color swatch. This will fill the black pillarbox bars with the same color as from the video. You see this in news casts all the time when mixing formats. It’s not that bad visually.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Yoneda]

Thanks for all the help. I will be able to just do the pan/crop for the 4:3 since most of the top and bottom portions are not needed since it’s a video of a soccer game (top has the sky).

Mike Yoneda
High Angle Video
Mililani, HI