16x9 project > 4x3 letterbox project

hey guys

anyone know how I could turn a 16x9 project into a 4x3 letterbox project?

Much appreciated

Dom
LA

Drop your 16x9 sequence into a new 4x3 sequence.

travis ballstadt
www.thrillcateditorial.com

G5DP2.5ghz, 4.5gbRAM, 2TB external SATA, Panasonic AJ-D455, G4PB1ghz, 15", 1gbRAM

Will it work the other way around? I have a 4:3 movie, I'd like to make it into a 16:9 anamorphic -- how do I do that?

No. Dropping 4:3 into an anamorphic 16:9 sequence will create a pillarboxed 16:9 video.

After you've dropped in the video you'll need to resize it to fit the full width of the 16:9 frame and reframe accordingly .

> After you've dropped in the video you'll need to resize it to fit the full width of the 16:9 frame
> and reframe accordingly.

That's not all. Anamorphic 16:9 media has to be vertically stretched. So in order to convert standard 4:3 media to 16:9, you have to first crop it top and bottom, then distort it vertically so that when it gets crunched down by anamorphic 16:9 devices, it will go back to its intended proportions. Distort - Aspect Ratio won't do it because this function doesn't stretch the frame; it only crunches (ie. it pulls the edges towards the center; it doesn't stretch the edges farther outward). So you have to do it by hand using the four corners under Distort.


www.derekmok.com

You have to crop it, distort it, then drop it into a 16:9 sequence?

Crop it and distort it within an anamorphic 16:9 sequence.


www.derekmok.com

not really derek... unless i'm missing something (one of my specialities)

poster wants to create an anamorphic 16:9 version of 4:3 source ... that means dropping the 4:3 source into the anamorphc 16:9 timeline, rezsizing to fit width (cropping is implied in the resize) and reframing (or more specifically, choosing what to crop due to the resize). the distortion of the 4:3 in the 16:9 anamorphic canvas is handled automaticaly by fcp.

cheers
Andy

> poster wants to create an anamorphic 16:9 version of 4:3 source ... that means dropping the
> 4:3 source into the anamorphc 16:9 timeline. the distortion of the 4:3 in the 16:9
> anamorphic canvas is handled automatically by fcp.

Now that I'm thinking, we may both be right.

I wonder if anybody's ever done a quality test.

Your method entails blowing up the image to fill. My method involves stretching it. So the question is: Which method yields less quality damage?

Here's some original media, 720x480 DV NTSC, no letterboxing or anamorphic stretch on tape, and captured as normal:



Here's your method, blowing up the image to 134 per cent:



This is what happens if I remove the Distort - Aspect Ratio applied by FCP:



And if I correct the distortion using the Distort values:



So the question is: Which looks better, a blowup or a stretch? The distort is a blowup as well, just a different kind.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah, it didn't work for me either, because I didn't know which filter to use. I tried many things. Everything got messed up. I think I'll have to trash my preferences because crazy things are beginning to happen (like only the top goes black and the bottom stays fully stretched.)

There should be no loss of quality.

The anamorphic squeeze takes the image in by 33.33 and the stretching takes the image out to 134%

Unless pixels are lost in the process of squeezing it?

thanks for the clarification Derek, i'm with you now.

what you're doing is the equivalent of adding the anamorphic flag to the raw (non-anamorphic) 4:3 source, and then distorting in the timeline.

i did do some tests on this once upon a time, although not the exact same scenario. at that time my conclusion was that the results were identical, and therefore the scale solution was the more straight-forward. however that was, as I say, a different issue (recompressing Oflline RT to Offline RT HD).

if it were me I'd do a quick test (in fact it is me, I do this often enough myself, I just don't have the time to test right now!). without knowing exactly how the calculations are processed there's no definitive way of knowing, but it may very well be that the anamorphic/distort method avoids some potential processing that could degrade quality.

cheers
Andy