16:9 / 4:3 letterbox - requirements?

EditPhish said:
Briceman,

Thanks for the explanation... this clued me into where to look in FCE for something similar, and I found it. I'm rendering it out now.

I CAN tell you though, there IS a quality loss. I'm going to take it into my wide-screen TV in a little while to see exactly how much. It isn't as bad as the results I got in After Effects, but it is easily noticable... at least to me. Just the fact you are stretching the footage (pixels) to fit a larger area tells you there HAS to be quality loss... it just depends how much.

If anyone has better solutions, I'm all ears.
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I still tend to disagree that there is a quality loss with this method. I don't understand how there is. I've watched this DVD on my HD 16:9 TV, and it looks eons better than a 4:3 letterboxed project played on the same TV.
 
it might look better on your hd tv due to the high contrast or other things - or the upscaling algorithms - but for SURE, the blown up version has a high loss - i just created both and i see the difference
 
briceman said:
I still tend to disagree that there is a quality loss with this method. I don't understand how there is. I've watched this DVD on my HD 16:9 TV, and it looks eons better than a 4:3 letterboxed project played on the same TV.
Click to expand...

I can only guess as to why -- probably because your plasma is doing a crappy job when stretching the 4:3 footage across the whole wide-screen area.

Even on my 13" cruddy TV I can see the difference from the original (not stretched in any weird way) and the upsized version... and it is NOT a slight difference, the quality loss is easily noticable on the upsized one. Now, that was with AE... I'm burning a DVD now to test the results using FCE scaling options directly. Previewing on my small monitor it looks better... but it there is still some loss.
 
Ok, I just watched the DVD again on my 13" Sony Trinitron Production Monitor. I have to say the footage looks identical in quality, and clarity as my originally captured DV25 footage from Avid. I don't understand why you all are having issues with it.
 
Briceman... I can't argue with your eyes and what you see, since I can't see it too :) -- All I can tell you is that everything I read said upsizing from 4:3 letterbox to 16:9 anamorphic was going to cause quality loss... and that's been my experience in all that I've tried so far. You are taking a 720 x 372 image area and stretching it vertically by 133% -- there is no way it DOESN'T cause quality loss... whether it's truly noticable or not probably depends a lot on your level of pickiness, your method and/or software used, what you're viewing it on etc.

I only read (and saw examples) of one way that didn't cause noticable loss, and that was an extremely time-consuming way, exporting the movie out as individual .tiff frames.
 
Well. I'm still confused as to what process you are going about doing the conversion. Theoretically, it should not lose any quality, because it takes your stretched footage and corrects it. How it loses quality is still beyond me. Sorry I could not be of more help. I hope the best for ya!:thumbsup:
 
Somehow I think we are talking about two different things.

I am talking about taking a film I shot in letterbox (blackbars already there)... cropping the black bars off (resulting size is 720 x 372) and scaling vertically so the whole shot covers the screen (scaling vertically so the final image is 720 x 480).

It corrects it on your TV, but that doesn't mea you aren't sizing the image vertically to get the TV to do it. At the source, if you're upsizing like that, there's going to be quality loss.
 
Well, I applied a mask to my 4:3 footage, essentially making that footage 720 x 372. I then took that and stretched it to the correct size. I think we're talking about the same thing. I just watched the DVD again on my 62" HD LCD TV, and it looked as good as anything I've seen from the DVX. I've played my 4:3 letterboxed DVD's on the same TV and they look horrid. This looked good!
 
Well all I can say then is it must be the way Avid resizes. Results were NOT good with After Effect or Final Cut Express. I don't have Compressor so that doesn't work for me.

If someone has any idea how to do this with Final Cut Express... or some way...
 
so say you have your movie in 4:3 mode timeline then you have widescreen mask on it at 2.35.1 what do you do next? take that put it in 16:9 timeline then export it then make into a mpg2 file? or what?
 
I shot in thin mode. Then i crop the video and make a 16.9 mpeg2 file in Vegas.

It looks a lot better than standard letterbox.
 
By thin mode I assume you mean 16:9 stretched. If that's what you mean, that's different than letterbox.
 
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