1st post! Widescreen Setting makes my image squish! Workflow?

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logangrime

Member
Hey everyone! Quick question. I have been shooting a tone of material with 4 dvx100's and have now been editing for sometime. The footage was recorded using the "letterbox" widescreen feature which i know is not true widescreen but used it anyways. As I edit my footage in final cut, it looks fine, it has the letter boxes. But when I either look at the raw footage, or do a quicktime export, it gets all stretched. I sort of understand the problem but It would be super helpful for someone to explain to me whats going on and how I can resolve it. Thanks!
 
logangrime said:
Hey everyone! Quick question. I have been shooting a tone of material with 4 dvx100's and have now been editing for sometime. The footage was recorded using the "letterbox" widescreen feature which i know is not true widescreen but used it anyways. As I edit my footage in final cut, it looks fine, it has the letter boxes. But when I either look at the raw footage, or do a quicktime export, it gets all stretched. I sort of understand the problem but It would be super helpful for someone to explain to me whats going on and how I can resolve it. Thanks!
Click to expand...

If you're shooting in letterbox, you should be working strictly in 4:3. It will not conform well to wide screen.

If you are wanting to edit and export in true 16:9 wide screen, you need to shoot in squeeze mode and then import into a 16:9 sequence.
 
im having a similar problem with my letterbox footage. can i crop the unused(letterbox) pixels in compressor to display a 640x360(square pixel display)?
 
1226381481.jpg


if this helps, this is what i see. looks good. i want to either export so it looks like that, or cut off the bars so the aspect ratio is still correct. im just kinda confused to what most people do
 
Then I'm not sure what the question is. Where is the image becoming distorted? Can you post a screen grab of that?

Again, since you have shot in letterbox, it is 720x480. By capturing, editing, and exporting with the DV NTSC settings, everything should be fine.
 
so here is the screeen shot when i change the output setting manually to 720x480 i guess fcp doesnt know to do that automatically. do most people leave it live this or do they crop the bars? is it possible to? should i not?

1226424514.jpg
 
Sqeeze

Sqeeze

I'm not sure that you can create a true 16x9 out a 4x3 in FCP alone. Maybe with other programs, like After Effects.

The reality is that shooting in letterbox is shooting 4x3. Some people think letterboxing is a waste, since you're cropping in-camera. The camera is actually recording black bars, so why not record the entire 4x3 image and crop later, in post?

I personally love squeeze mode. It's a cheat, since the camera is using a 4x3 chip and squeezing the image so, later, in FCP, you get a true 16x9 image and workflow.

Search and read about squeeze. There's a lot of debate about the quality loss and all that. But I love it, especially when you know you want your final image to be 16x9.

Christopher J. Boghosian, Filmmaker
 
logangrime said:
yeah 24p. do tell more!
Click to expand...

I'm going to assume you've shot 24p standard and are editing in a 29.97 timeline. First off, you need to go to your sequence settings and change your field dominance to none. At this point you might need to re-render your timeline because of the field change and save as a different file so you have something to go back to.

Next I'm going to also assume that you want this for web, so export using quicktime conversion and click Options>Settings>Select H.264 and Restrict data rate to 1500 and click Ok. Next, go to Size>Dimensions>NTSC 720x480 4:3 and leave all the checkboxes unmarked and click Ok. Finally for sound, Settings>Format>AAC and click Ok. Finally name your file and click Save. When its all done, you should have a nice progressive quicktime file ready for web. Note: since computer screens render pixels square, the quicktime will play back at 640x480. Hope this helps,

longshanks
 
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