[Jorge Sinclair]

Thk you indeed Dave. Now I have my answer, and it fits something I suspected already: we easily forget the past, so 4/3 productions are condamned to belong to cinema museums. That includes unfortunately all independent films, even rather recent, fimed in 16mm…
Luckyly Media100 had thought about it and made the transfer from 4/3 to 16/9 easily possible, even if it lasted only one software generation (media100 11.5)That’s life, nowadays life.

Jorge

[Jorge Sinclair]

Hi Michael,
I got the answer through a very short and clear post from Mr MacCarthy (who I thank indeed): my custom settings are only possible through a hardware operation -like the one possible with the Opcode’s cards- That’s the secret. Software only systems seems to have difficulties in this kind of treatment. Now I know. Thnk you folks

Jorge

[Jorge Sinclair]

Thank you for your fast answer Michael. I do know that the option of cropping exist in the new software version. You still have either the pillarbox or the letterbox, and the crop. But the crop is symetric, meaning that it takes the center of the image, cropping equally the top and the bottom of the 4/3 frame to fulfill the 16/9. In long shots that works fine, but in close-ups or even in standard dialog framing, the top of the head of the actor is wiped out, sometimes at the eyebrows level.
On the “old” hardware HD version instead, you can move the crop up or down as you want, deciding for instance to do only a little crop on the top of the image, which is automatically compensated with a big crop of the lower part in order to keep the 16/9 proportions. And, oh miracle, you can do this at acquisition, so the file you have in your bin and later on the timeline is already cropped the right way, and in HD. And you car save in memory as many custom settings as you want, so yo can reframe shot by shot with slight differences if you are maniac enough. That’s what the newer version lacks (unless we are blind, but I swear we have searched !) Thanks again Michael.

Jorge