[Robert Gilbert]

It worked!

Dear Jeff,

Thank you so much for all your help!

It was my oversight. I was using only VLC to check the output. VLC wasn’t automatically sizing it’s screen to hug my widescreen movie, so it naturally produced black bars to fill in the oversized (4:3?) screen (even though I had tried the various aspect ratio options). I only realized this when I tried to play my clip on QuickTime, which did adjust it’s screen to hug the widescreen video!

I did a test upload to YouTube and found only a hairline of black at the bottom. Could you please suggest the best method of removing that line?

And could you please suggest the best settings for a version that I can upload directly to Film Freeway?

[Robert Gilbert]

I didn’t use the cropper in the Encoder.

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you, Jeff. What did you use for the Output “aspect”? I did just what you said using square pixels (because that was there by default). Then I tried it again with DV PAL widescreen as the aspect. Neither of the two attempts worked. I set it to 1 pass to save time. You wrote “scale to fit” but the settings photo showed “scale to fill”, so I tried both but nothing worked. Please advise me further.

[Robert Gilbert]

Thanks.

[Robert Gilbert]

Dear Jeff,

The first two images are from the SD version (Silver car and Settings)
The second two are from the HD version (Close up and Settings)
They were not squashed in premiere

[Robert Gilbert]

[Robert Gilbert]

[Robert Gilbert]

Thank you for helping me, Jeff. Maybe I should say more about this project. I shot this film years ago. I think I can safely say that the black bars don’t depend on the playback.

I recall struggling with importing the raw footage. I had to capture it in Final Cut, then bring it into Premiere. I think I had to conform it to square pixels (if i remember correctly). At the present, I have reopened the old project and imported the upscaled version of the finished film for the sole purpose of adding subtitles to the upscaled version. I’m doing this in order to be able to enter festivals and to have a nicer HD version on the web. I can replace the upscaled version with the SD version in the timeline, as you said I should and work with that.

Please note that Ann Bens said that even if I succeed in removing the black bars, YouTube will put them back anyway and the film festival projection will do the same. That would mean I’m wasting my time, but I assume that would only be the case if the finished cropped aspect ratio was not 16/9. Can I really crop it to a perfect 16/9? If Ann is right then I’m wasting my time. Please advise me on that!

BTW I’ve been using the word footage to mean the two versions of the finished film. I don’t have the raw footage with me.

[Robert Gilbert]

Yeah, I noticed the black bars disappeared when I uploaded that smoking woman photo to the Cow. What might that imply? I think I snapped that shot of her from a test clip on VLC.
Also: one of my test clips, at first played without bars on vlc, but when I enlarged the vlc screen the bars appeared.

[Robert Gilbert]

BTW there’s nothing anamorphic here. The camera created this monster because I was told to shoot in Letterbox mode, which creates a fake widescreen in the 4/3 camera lens.

I re-imported the original SD footage and I did the “new sequence from clip” at FIT (all new to me) and there are no black bars on the monitor. I was going to export it now but I think I need to change the dimensions in the encoder, because it says 720 x 576 which would be the overall 4/3 dimensions which would never come out as 16/9. What dimensions should I type in?

These are the settings generated by my clicking “new sequence from clip”:

As for my export settings I’ve tried just about every combination I could think of!