mixing 16:9 with 4:3 pal

[Dino Muhic]

Since you loose quality when you resize your stuff (for example scaling up the 16:9 material to fit 4:3) you should consider adding black bars on the 4:3 material to make them fit 16:9 or start with a 16:9 comp and import the 4:3 material as well as the 16:9 meterial and make a 16:9 clip (this means fitting the 4:3 stuff to the size of the 16:9 and loosing filmed areas on top and the bottom, but still i would prefer this version).

Cletus

[Nils Palmen]

the problem is that you can’t loose top and bottom when putting a 4:3 into a 16:9 cause the 16:9 is bigger than 4:3 … you will loose both sides when putting 16:9 into a 4:3 project… or you can scale it down to fit 4:3 …

now i’m trying to conform all my files through premiere pixel aspect ratio …

anyone have another idea??

[Steve Roberts]

If your final video is 4:3, then your 16:9 video should be dragged into a 4:3 comp. If you want it to be letterboxed, scale it down to fit the comp, using cmd+opt+shift+H. If you want the 16:9 video to fill the comp, it should do that automatically, but you will crop out the content on either side of the 16:9 video.

If your final video is 16:9, then your 4:3 video should be dragged into a 16:9 comp. If you want it to be pillarboxed (bars on the sides), that should happen automatically. If you want it to fill the comp, you need to scale it up to fit the comp width, using cmd+opt+shift+H. However, you will lose (not “loose”) content at the top and bottom of the 4:3 footage.

If you scale anything up, there will be quality loss. There are plugins to minimize this: look at digital anarchy’s resizer.
https://www.digitalanarchy.com/resizer/resizer_main.html

The fit-to-width shortcut on Windows should be ctrl+alt+shift+H.

[Nils Palmen]

so scaling dwon 16:9 to 4:3 is the best option ? because the pixels are not pumped? instead of scaling up…

i still find it strange there isn’t a pixel aspect ratio button in AE (or is there) … so any footage will be interpreted right by AE.

[Steve Roberts]

All footage should be automatically interpreted by AE correctly, so 16:9 is 16:9, and 4:3 is 4:3. Make sure it is interpreted correctly by selecting the item in the project window and viewing its information at the top of the screen. If not, choose file>interpret footage>main and change the pixel aspect ratio.

My post assumed the footage was interpreted correctly. When both formats are interpreted correctly and dropped into one comp, one clip will be too wide, or the other clip will be too narrow. There’s no automatic way to mix footage with two different aspect ratios. They don’t match! One is wide and one is narrow! You have to scale one up or one down or put up with black bars if you don’t want one to look squashed.

Maybe this article by Rick Gerard will help.

[Dino Muhic]

The 16:9 is not bigger, the program just scales the 4:3 footage down to match the 16:9 height. But if you scale it back to fit the 4:3 width to the 16:9 width there still won’t be a quality loss….

So why not make a 16:9, import the 4:3 footage and scale it so it matches the width of the 16:9 footage?

[Karim Daire]

Hi,

reading this thread I wonder if I can also squeeze in a question. I work in PAL and you wrote resolution is equal and should be 720×576 for 4:3 and 16:9?? So 16:9 is anamorphic and if I want a 4:3 Sequence mixed in with 16:9 Material the 16:9 Material has to be stretched in width and lose information on the left and right. Is that right and does AE automatically interpret the footage like this when I drop 16:9 Material in a 4:3 comp? Never worked with this, but might have to soon and the whole aspect ratio thing is a little confusing for me.
Thanks in advance,

Karim

[Nils Palmen]

okay – tnx steve!

the main problem is that i thought there was a way to combine the two without needing to scale them … cause i always have a feeling scaling meses up the quality.

just like in premiere pro – i use widescreen with 4:3 … so i guess i just need to scale the widescreens down to fit the 4:3 … tnx for the help!

[Nils Palmen]

what confused me was that when you put a 16:9 in 4:3 it fit in height but not in width … so i think that scaling down (16:9 to 4:3) instead of blowing up (4:3 to 16:9) is better – else the pixels get bigger …

i did the blowing up thing a while ago and my footage got a little bit hazy … it had less sharpness.

[Steve Roberts]

A 16:9 video image has the same number of pixels as a 4:3 video image, but the pixels are of a different shape, or aspect ratio.

In other words, 720 fat pixels looks different from 720 skinny pixels.

Anyway, read the Rick Gerard article I cited earlier.