16:9 and 4:3 shooting.

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IF this has been covered under other posts, than I pray that I not be drawn and quartered by other dvxuser.com users!

Here is my question. Have PP 1.5, shot footage on DVX, 24p, 4:3 but taped off to 16:9. I captured the footage into the PC...now how do I use the 4:3 clips? Was I supposed to import/capture it differently? And finally, how do I export so that TV's of every persuasion, 16:9 & 4:3, will show it properly?

I apologize for asking...but I've always shot 4:3 for political ads on TV.

ANd thank you in advance for all the help.
 
if you shot 4:3, taped off to 16:9, im guessing you want to work with a 4:3 project setting and then in your project, create a black bars video layer. You're loosing a lot of lines of resolution shooting and outputting like that though, does your camera not have a 16:9 mode?
 
Resolution loss is a good point, but sometimes I like to shoot 4:3 and then letterbox it, since then I can reframe vertically if my composition wasn't perfect
 
Just to make sure, by taped off you mean your dp used tape on the monitor as a 16:9 guide right? Or do you mean there are black letterbox bars in your footage?
 
Imm not sure what you guys are talking about. Shooting 4:3 on location and then using tape on the LCD to mask to 16:9 for post-production is the best way to get the best resolution for widescreen use since the DVX doesnt have native 16:9 chip. Now f he shot in "stretch" mode, than he would be losing resolution, but he didnt. "letterbox" is just 4:3 with black bars applied over the video, no resolution loss.
 
Actually, there is a very slight improvement in resolution when you squeeze/stretch.

It makes sense that they'd be exactly the same - you've got a CCD that's designed to put out a 720x480 image, and whether you're letterboxing pixels away in post or throwing them away in-camera (and stretching the image to full-frame), you're losing the same number of pixels.

Let's imagine ending up in a 16:9 project though. If you had 4:3 letterbox footage, you'd scale it up to reach 720x480 16:9. You're doing basically the same thing in the camera with the stretch mode BUT the camera's hardware will give you a slightly better-quality image than using software to upres.

In my case, this slight improvement hasn't been enticing enough for me to throw away the flexibility of vertically adjusting my composition later in post. What you certainly don't want to do is have the camera toss letterbox bars on (ie no squeeze, just letterboxed 4:3).
 
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