Help! Editing & Rendering Letterbox video

A

andybiz_2005

Well-known member
Hi all,

I need some help regarding something. I recently shot a wedding with my DVX with the "letterbox" setting in which the aspect ratio is 16:9 & both the top & bottom of the screen is blacked out. My wedding client requested that I do this so that it looks more like watching a movie.

OK, then I uploaded the footage into Premiere Pro 1.5 using the following setting : "DV-PAL Widescreen 48KHz", Pixel aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.422).

After editing the entire wedding, I test burned it on a DVD to see the result. After burning, I played it back from my PC's 4:3 aspect ratio LCD monitor & it looked fine (black bars on top & bottom of monitor & 16:9 aspect ratio)

Then I tested the same DVD I burned on my DVD player & viewed it from a normal 4:3 CRT TV. However, when I played it from my CRT TV, some parts of the left & right hand side of the footage was cut off to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio of the TV & there were no black bars on top & below of the movie.

I want to know if I made a mistake when I selected 16:9 aspect ratio in Premiere when I first opened this project. Should I have selected 4:3 aspect ratio in Premiere instead? Since my timeline is already set in the 16:9 aspect ratio & my video is fully edited, can I changed the existing timeline to 4:3, or do I have to edit the entire wedding all over again in 4:3 aspect ratio? Please help as I don't know what to do. Thanks.

Andrew
 
Oh,

No worries, I already managed to find out what was the problem. It was just a simple setting on my DVD player to view the movie with the black bars on top & bottom.
 
whoa whoa whoa. you shot letterboxed and you put it into a 16:9 timeline? I thought that produced bad things? letterboxed is actually a 4:3 image. Interesting....
 
Yep, actually this is the 1st time I shot letterboxed with my DVX & edited it in a 16:9 timeline.

When I dropped the uploaded video into the timeline, it appeared a bit smaller & did not fill up the entire 16:9 real estate on the Monitor window. So I scaled it bigger(right up to the video-safe area). However when I burnt a small section of the edited video to DVD & tested it on my DVD player & TV, the image still looked sharp as ever. Thankfully!

It was just a simple setting from my DVD's remote control to make the black bars appear on top & below the movie. Pretty darn cool too, esp when I discovered the solution quite by accident :)

Please let me know if anyone out there has tried the exact same thing & produced different results. Happy to hear about it. Thanks.
 
The interesting thing to note is, when I played back the test DVD on my TV, the people, objects, etc did not look horizontally stretched or scale-distorted. Everything appeared to be in their perfect proportions.
 
You probably had some resolution loss. you just made a 4:3 image into a 16:9. But if you couldnt notice then theres no problem!
 
Yep, when I played back the DVD on my TV, the images still looked extremely sharp & clear. The edges where sharp as well.
 
Is this an example of "bending" the rules a little bit & getting away with it, cause it's not noticable & proportion looks right?

What happens if I were the play this same DVD on a real 16:9 LCD TV? Will the subjects be horizontally stretched so they appear a bit wider than they are higher?
 
the dvd player setting is to tell your player what the aspect ratio of the TV is. If the player is set correctly to the aspect ratio of the display device then the video will play back correctly.
 
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