Export as Wide Screen from 4:3 video with letterbox

B

BrenMyster

Well-known member
All my footage is 4:3 with back bars as the letter box. I have a DVX and found that the only way to get widescreen is to letterbox, then when i capture it it captures as 3:4 with the black bars.

Now i have my whole video editied and want to put it on a DVD as a wide screen DVD, I just need to export it without the back bars.

Any idea how i would do this with Final Cut.

Thanks
 
I'm not a DVX guy, so I'll have to ask, does the DVX have a native 16:9 shooting ability or did you use any kind of wide angle adapter when you shot the footage to squeeze it into the 4:3 chip?

It is first thing in the morning here so am still a little foggy, but if you didn't shoot 16:9 then I don't think you're going to be able to make a very nice looking 16:9 DVD. You would need to artificially zoom in on your 4:3 footage to make it fill a 16:9 frame. Then you could take that out to MPEG-2 and have a full frame 16:9 image. You would lose some of the vertical image though (in addition to losing resolution from doing a digital zoom). Again though, I'm not a DVX guy at all, so there might be something I'm overlooking here. Good luck.

cheers.
 
I imagine you recorded the image as Straight to Letterbox rather than Squeeze? The Squeeze would create a native 16:9 image, while recording straight to 4:3 with a letterbox embeds the black bars.

If the Letterbox option is the case, you can export the 4:3 timeline into compressor and use the crop function to get rid of the black bars and create a native 16:9 file.
 
If you crop the letterbox bars to create a native 16:9 file, wouldn't you then have peculiar dimensions? Sure the ratio is 16:9, but then when you go to play it back out on a 16:9 TV set it will "zoom" in on the file to fill the full 16:9 and thus degrade the image? Or can Compressor "zoom" it as well to fill out a normal 16:9 frame? Because I wouldn't want to leave it to my TV to do the zoom, that'll do a heavier degrade on the footage then had you used FCP or some third party application to do it before hand.

cheers.
 
Not sure what my options are, i think i will have to crop it in a third party. I need the dvd to be 16:9 so i don't have much choice, unless i can crop and export 16:9 in FCP.
 
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