that extra long look on 16 x 9

rajour

rajour

Active member
Can anyone please tell or direct me to an online resource that will show me how people are stretching out their footage to be long and narrow? Before doing so, let me say, I am shooting with a 16x9 adaptor on my DVX100a. It works fine but does not look like some of the footage I see online.

Rick Foy
www.dvidfilms.com
 
if you have a animorphic lence dont u get a true 16x9? I dont have one but thats what i thoght. I am probably just gona get it even thogh it's like 600 smackers i would much rather get it to save me time and hasel.
 
I am sorry, I guess I did not make myself clear....I don't want to know how to make it look like film (I already know that) I want to know how to make the aspect ration look longer. Yes, it is longer and it is true 16x9 with my adaptor but when I look at other peoples work online.....it is much longer. It looks more rectangle.....there are no black bars on the top or bottom just one long a@# picture. Please help me figure this out.

Rick Foy
www.dvidfilms.com

If you go to my site you will see how my footage look....I want it to look longer like other peoples.
 
I'm not understanding what you mean by "longer". Your 16:9 looks great. Maybe if you could point to an example or screen-capture a still of what you are looking at it would help. The next step up in "narrowness" from 16:9 is 2.35:1. Now there is no standard way to display that on video, except to embed it in a 16:9 frame, making it another form of letterbox. Maybe 2.35:1 can be played online without letterboxing? If so I'd be interested to find out about that.

I was able to get 2.35:1 by either cropping 16:9 in post or by shooting in 16:9 with an anamorphic lens adapter, squeezing the image twice.. For example, you can shoot in squeeze mode to get 16:9 and then also use the Anamorphic lens adapter at the same time, which will give you 2.35:1 footage that has to be stretched out in post.

Here is an example shot on an HVX200 in 16:9 with the Anamorphic adapter in front. I brought it into Final Cut as 16:9 footage and then marked the aspect ratio as "anamorphic" to get FC to recognize it as 2.35:1.

HVX_anamorphic.jpg


oh... and here is a 16:9 shot on the DVX (in 4:3 mode) with the anamorphic adapter so you can compare:
DVX_anamorphic.jpg


...and 4:3 on the DVX...
DVX_normal.jpg
 
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Yes, that is it....it is the 1st picture above...however, I am using Avid Xpress DV not Final Cut so I don't know how you get it to look longer. I want it to look like the very 1st example. It seems like this is something I have to do in post.
Can you tell me if I shoot with squeeze and my an anamorphic how do I do it in Avid Xpress; I do have FC but I hate it because I learned on Avid. I don't know what you mean when you say, "which will give you 2.35:1 footage that has to be stretched out in post.". How do you stretch in post?
 
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Sorry... it took longer than expected to reply.


One way to get 2.35:1 video from the DVX is to shoot in standard or widescreen mode and to crop/stretch the image in post. That would be a simple thing to do in a program like After Effects. There are three reasons why you'd be better off using this approach to get the "wide look" rather than shooting in 2.35:1.

#1) By the time you get footage shot on the DVX stretched out to a 2.35:1 screen, you've lost about 50% of the detail.
#2) Working with 2.35:1 footage in most editors is not easy. There are usually no presets for such a project and you have to go in and tinker with the settings to create a 2.35:1 project.
#3) Framing and Focusing with the anamorphic adapter is not easy to begin with, and then doing that while in squeeze mode means that what you see on the LCD will be really distorted.

Anyway...

I don't have Avid. So I'll try to explain what I did, and maybe you can figure it out from there if you want to try it.

The first trick to shooting 2.35:1 footage is to apply both a digital squeeze and an optical squeeze. So with the DVX, you would normally shoot 16:9 either by recording in "squeeze" mode OR by recording in standard 4:3 mode with an anamorphic lens adapter. If you record in "squeeze" mode AND use an anamorphic lens adapter, then you are shooting in 2.35:1.

The second trick is figuring out what to do with that footage once you've got it. Working with the 2.35:1 footage in post requires two tricks that might take some tinkering to figure out. First, you have to figure out how to get a 2.35:1 project to work in. And it is unlikely that there are any presets for this in the editing program. Second, you have to figure out how to get the footage stretched to fit a 2.35:1 screen. That means the footage has to be stretched once to adjust for being shot in "squeeze" mode and then stretched again to adjust for being shot with an anamorphic lens adapter.

When you record in "squeeze" mode, the DVX marks the footage as widescreen and the editor recognizes the footage as widescreen. When it is imported into a widescreen project it is stretched to fit the 16:9 screen.

When you use an anamorphic adapter for 16:9, the DVX is recording in 4:3 mode and marks the footage as "standard" 4:3. So you have to go in manually and tell the editor that the footage is "anamorphic" to get it to stretch the footage to fit a 16:9 screen.

What I did was to import the 2.35:1 footage into a 16:9 widescreen project. The editing program recognized the widescreen mark that the DVX put onto the footage because it was shot in "squeeze", and stretched it to fit the 16:9 screen. Then I changed the project settings to turn the project from a 16:9 project into a 2.35:1 project. Finally, I found the manual settings for the clip properties and set that to "anamorphic", which caused the editing program to stretch the footage again, adjusting for being shot with the anamorphic lens adapter, fitting the 2.35:1 screen.

That was in Final Cut. In Premiere I would look at the "Interpret Footage" settings. Some movies are actually shot on film in 2.35:1 aspect ratio with special anamorphic adapter lenses. When it gets transferred to video, it looks just like the double-squeezed footage you've shot with the DVX. And that footage has to be stretched out in post and requires a 2.35:1 project.

You may find information about how to deal with that kind of footage in your editing program by researching film-to-video workflow. Also, you might try another posting in the Avid section of DVXuser and asking them how to work with 2.35:1 footage.

Good luck!

Andy
 
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Andy, thank you so very much...you have been the most helpful and I really do appreciate the time you took to break it down like you did. Much respect to you. I wish you the best in your work and keep being a blessing to others. Peace.

Rick
www.dvidfilms.com
 
Has anyone shot serious work using squeeze with the adaptor? Does anyone have 2.35 footage I can see? That sounds very interesting, Panavision format from a DVX. I have done a bit of squeeze mode so if the 2.35 with the adaptor is the same quality or greater then that i definitely want to try it out.

roger
 
fotoflo said:
Has anyone shot serious work using squeeze with the adaptor? Does anyone have 2.35 footage I can see? That sounds very interesting, Panavision format from a DVX. I have done a bit of squeeze mode so if the 2.35 with the adaptor is the same quality or greater then that i definitely want to try it out.

roger
Click to expand...
Roger,

Bear in mind that there is no 2.35:1 delivery format. DVD is either 4:3 or 16:9. So, any 2.35:1 eventually needs to be converted to letterboxed 16:9 for delivery.

With that in mind, it's usually more flexible to shoot 16:9 and letterbox in post. That will give you flexibiltity to reframe shots a bit if necessary.

Shooting full frame anamorphic 2.35:1 on miniDV is more of a curiosity than anything else.

Josh
 
I did some more reading last night on this forum and saw that, but it is at least possible, yes? I mean, movies are delivered in that format but for now am more interested in getting the best 16:9 from the camera without an adapter. This DVD format and shooting modes is slowly sinking in and its great to have it spelled out for you by Barry Green and Andy Starbuck and others. If i want to imitate the movie look, what better way than to put something in a movie format?

roger
 
When you shoot in 16:9 and then crop it in post, you have the option of going back to 16:9 if you want. A lot of movies are in 16:9 aspect ratio, which is cinema "Widescreen". I agree with Josh that you will get more flexibility and it will be a *lot* easier to shoot by starting with 16:9 and then cropping if you want later.

The anamorphic adapter is pretty hard to work with. In the example 2.35:1 I posted, look on the left side and you'll see that the shot has some vignetting where the edge of the lens shade got into the frame.

There is no video delivery method for anything but 16:9. If you shoot in 2.35:1, that's two squeezes, followed by two stretches. Then you have to resize it down again to fit letterboxed into a 16:9 sequemce for output. With five transformations the chances are that the image will lose detail and develop artifacts. You can get the same result by shooting 16:9 and cropping to 2.35:1 in a 16:9 sequence. Then you've got only one squeeze and stretch. So it will probably be a sharper image.
 
scene11.jpg


can't really see it here, but i did use my anamorphic lens at the time for this shot. at the edges a quarter way in on both sides the image curved. i used my graphics program to fix it. another reason i personally stopped using it.
 
Roger, 2.35:1 films on DVD are actually 16:9 with letterbox.

On the plus side for using an anamorphic adaptor is the unique look of the footage. Anamorphic widescreen films have a feeling that I appreciate. You can tell by the shape of the bokeh. Anamorphic will have tall eliptical boken, instead of the round boken of spherical lenses. I'm not sure how that translates on the DVX, which has more of a diamond boken, but it will have a different feel.
 
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