Letter boxing in Premiere

[Guest]

How on earth do I do a letter box in Premiere Pro? I'd been doing it with magic bullet, but then when I render in PP it gets blurry towards the edge of the box so I want to do my letterbox in premiere pro but I dont know how ???

[Guest]

;D In the Title box, under Mattes.

[brian]

someone told me a while back that croping the top and the bottom both 12.5% would do it, and thats how i've been doing it ever since...

[Neil Rowe]

... thats not letterboxing. thats cropping. what that is is cropping to a 16:9 image. which is the same as what the dvx does. and it leaves the apparent look as though the footage has been letterboxed. the dvx mode should really be called "crop 16:9" but they call it "letterbox", cause thats what it looks like, and people are alredy confused enough. ..anyway, "letterboxing" is the act of taking an image which is originally 16:9 (wider than what would fit on your 4:3 tv, and shrinking it so that it fits its full width on the screen. and what you are left with is black on the top and bottom of the screen. there is no cropping involved in letterboxing. you are just taking the full size original image, and shrinking it to fit its full width onto a 4:3 screen.

[Mike_Donis]

That is true IAL, but many films are labelled as "Letterboxed" when in fact they're just being presented in their original aspect ratio, with the "bars". Films shot in 1.85 or 1.66 are normally "soft matted", shot exposing the full negative, and masked during projection (or bars are added for video releases).
:D

[Neil Rowe]

..thats all too true. any 35mm feature is just cropped to its screening aspect ratio. unless you shoot on that wierd 35mm stock thats wide.

[Barry_Green]

? What "weird" 35mm stock?

All 35mm stock is the same stuff. There's about 24mm between the sprocket holes.

"Flat" 35mm features (which make up about 60% of theatrical releases, using the 1.85:1 aspect ratio) are shot using the full 4:3 frame, 24x18mm, and soft-matted (or hard-matted through the gate) to 1.85:1. The net effect is basically letterboxing, just like Mike said. You get a usable aperture of around 22x12mm.

Anamorphic 35mm is shot using the entire height of the frame, but just a little less width, for a frame size of 1.2:1. The lens optically squeezes the image at a ratio of 2:1, so when projected unsqueezed you get about 2.4:1.

Super35 (which may be what IAL was referring to) uses the entire frame size, all 24 x 18mm. For television work you use that 4:3 Super35 image and get a very high-resolution, almost grainless image. But for movie work, Super35 is usually used as a substitute for anamorphic, so you crop the image down to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, giving you 24 x 10mm image size. That gets optically anamorphosized when printing your release print, so it gets optically stretched to 22x18.

There's also VistaVision, where the film runs through the camera sideways (instead of vertically) and gives you a much wider image, but that's downright rare nowadays...

[Neil Rowe]

haha! *i guess im speaking liberally .. or really just misworded. the film dosent change. just the method in which its used. so . to reiterrate. "unless your shooting 35mm stock in that weird way thats wide.. " :) thanks for the clarification on that. i have tendancies to write things differently than what im thinking. :P

[pennred]

What I have done is steal a letterbox frame from a DVD in the correct aspect ratio. I then use Titler to make a mask. A tip tho, when adjusting your edges change you mask to a bright color so you can differentiate between the mask edge and the DVD frame edge. Last thing you want is a think black line which is different from the PP black. Then I just save this om the HD for later use.

Joe Greig