Aspect Ratio Question

K

knightowl

Active member
Help!

I'm doing a commercial and they wanted letterboxing. So I shot in Widescreen, thinking I could render in normal aspect ratio.

The footage looks fine, but does anyone know what I should do to make the footage fit into a TV screen format? Every time I play it on my DVD player, the outer edges are lost.

I shot in Widescreen, edited in normal NTSC DV (0.9091) and rendered out in 0.9091.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jeff
 
The outer edges will almost always be lost. The so-called TV safe zone is where you're supposed to be framing during shooting. (About 10% less than the actual image size, pretty much what shows up in the LCD on the camera.)

You could shrink the image in the NLE, but you run the chance of winding up with black bars on the top/bottom and the sides, too.

But if you want to try, turn on the safe zone rectangles in the preview (the tic tac toe button at the top will let you choose what to show). Shrink the image to fit into the *outer* rectangle. The inner one is the "title safe zone", which is much to small for your purposes.
 
Jeff,
so your client wants letterboxed? From the way you wrote it, it looks like your client wanted letterboxed widescreen and you profided that... what is the problem you're having? Are you just having trouble with playback in the DVD player? If that's the case, then you need to make sure both your DVD is set to the correct aspect ratio (your TV as well). Also, when you edited in normal NTSC DV, did the letterboxing show up correctly during editing? What about the rendered version?

-pasty
 
The client wanted white bars at the top and bottom, and also widescreen. So I shot in widescreen, then converted to 0.9091 in editing. The letterboxing showed up fine. I'm not sure about my DVD setting and TV setting, though... hmmm... need to figure out how to check that.

The main problem I'm having is this... when I watch it on Media Player or a DVD player on my computer, it's fine. When I watch it on a TV, the outer edges are off the screen, which unfortunately is where the client's phone numbers are located.

Jeff
 
Like I said, it's going to be that way. TVs do that (except genuine widescreen TVs). You'll have to use the Crop control to shrink the image to fit inside that area.
 
GenJerDan said:
Like I said, it's going to be that way. TVs do that (except genuine widescreen TVs). You'll have to use the Crop control to shrink the image to fit inside that area.
Click to expand...

Yep, that is a great point... you've got to make sure you text is inside the "safe zone" in your NLE!
 
But if the text was created in the NLE, then just re-do it so it fits. You might want to put it into the "title safe" area (the inner rectangle), at that, and not shrink the image...unless you have action going on in the outer edges, too.
 
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