Exporting a 4x3 vid and converting it to 16:9

chrischart

chrischart

Member
I currently shot and edit my footage in 4x3 and simply add black bars to the top and bottom to aquire a 'widescreen' look.

I heard that it was possible to export my 4x3 project in such a way that it crops off the top and bottom black bars.

Is this true and does anyone know how to do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)
 
Hmm. Good question. Using the Letterbox filter in Compressor I was able to add black letterbox bars to the footage, but it still output as 4:3. I tried the crop option, but that just seemed to squish the footage to fit the new dimensions, not chop off the top and bottom.

I could get Autodesk Cleaner to do it, but it took some futzing with the aspect ratio and crop options. I can't believe that Cleaner can do it, but Compressor cannot. The more likely scenario is that I am dumb.

If anyone figures this one out, they are a better man than I.
 
You can crop off the letterbox black bars sure, but then you're left with a peculiar frame size. The aspect ratio may be 16:9, but its not standard 16:9 frame size by simply chopping the bars off. I've never done it, so not sure if you export the peculiar frame size if somewhere along the line something (compression software, playback device, or tv set) will then "enlarge" it to fill the full 16:9 screen. If it does, that's basically a digital zoom. Allowing anything to automatically do a digital zoom is going to likely degrade things a lot worse than you might be able to achieve if you do it in the first place.

So if you were to do it yourself, you would throw the 4:3 clips onto a 16:9 sequence, zoom in so that the full 16:9 frame is filled. You will obviously get a loss of footage vertically. So you may then have to go in shot by shot to re-frame some things. After that's done and you have a 16:9 locked cut, you could then safely export a full 16:9 movie. However, how well FCP can handle the enlargement on its own, I'm not sure. You might need to seek a third party plugin or software to better preserve the quality of the footage. Good luck.

cheers.
 
Thanks for the info guys.
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The cropping technique you both mentioned will work fine. I'm only wanting the cropped 16x9 version for internet viewing, so any loss of quality in the crop could be made up in the compression stage. The final product will be 4x3.
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Next time, i'll just shoot in 16x9 mode next time. Rookie from me...You live and learn ey?
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Thanks again guys!
 
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