Change to widescreen?

[Jbadham77]

Is there a way with sony vegas, without using pan / crop, to make non widescreen videos.. into widescreen?

[J.R. Hudson]

None that I know of.

[MisterCat]

Technically you could use generated media (black rectangles) and overlay a track of each across the top and bottom of your frame to create the illusion of shooting in widescreen. This avoids pan/crop but unless you framed your shots for this you're out of luck.

[Pesie]

Why don't you want to use the pan/crop tool? 4:3 and 16:9 have different formats, so that's the only way.

I convert my 4:3 videomaterial to 16:9 dvd with Vegas for my movie projects and get good results:
1. create a 16:9 project in Vegas
2. import the 4:3 video and put in on the timeline
3. rightclick on the video at the timeline and check Switches: make sure the Maintain Aspect Ratio option is not marked
4. add the widescreen letterboxing to the video, using the Pan/Crop tool for each videosegment; with the Pan/Crop tool you have some vertical headroom to choose the best widescreen framing within the 4:3 video
5. after editing, render the timeline to an 16:9 Widescreen MPEG2 file. Make sure you use the Best Quality setting, the Variable Bitrate and 2 Pass options for best quality.

Hope this is of any help.

[GenJerDan]

Why don't you want to use the pan/crop tool?

It's per event?

Now, if you are framing each shot differently, moving the crop up and down, that's necessary.

But if you've already framed it correctly while shooting, it's a pain in the butt.

[David Jimerson]

It's not too much of a pain. All you have to do is crop one, copy it, then paste attributes on all of the others. Of course, you need to do that before you add any effects.

Or, if you're using V6, you can open the VEG file as a nested project in a new project and just crop the whole thing.