How do you create a 1.85:1 aspect ratio?

L

liscos909

Active member
I want to crop my 1080/16:9/1.77 footage to an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 so how would I go about doing this on CS5.5? Is there 1.85 preset? If not what resolution and pixel aspect ratio should I use? Or is there some other easier way?
 
Here is an easy way.


Place a Premiere Count Down Leader on the Timeline. ( its a temporary thing)

Note that there are 2 rings on the leader. Inner one is 1:85. Outer one is 1.66

Open The titler and make a mask to the 1:85 ring. (two filled black rectangles or even simply two horizontal lines)

Use that Title (mask) to show you where to Crop your image to.
 
siberia88 said:
Thanks I will try that but is there a more precise/official way to do this?
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Well you can do the pixel math if you really want to ... but the rings on a SMPTE leader were designed to show exactly where the aspect ratios are.

Why not use them for what they are designed for.

BTW: The real "official" way is to hard mask your camera gate or put a mask in an optical printer.

I am guessing you are looking for a plugin.
 
I guess I'm looking for either a preset or the math. By official I meant what most people in the dslr community are doing. I see cropped videos all the time and I was just wondering if there was a general consensus on how to achieve this in a precise way but I guess everyone has their own method.
 
siberia88 said:
I guess I'm looking for either a preset or the math. By official I meant what most people in the dslr community are doing. I see cropped videos all the time and I was just wondering if there was a general consensus on how to achieve this in a precise way but I guess everyone has their own method.
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As indicated the 'official' way is to crop 'in camera', for many films. The alternative is to crop at some time during post processing. This is done frequently enough, in film, where the film negative is shot 4:3, then cropped to whatever later. (Or an anamorphic lens is used.) If the output is for DVD/Blueray, then there will be letter boxing.

In any case, if you did not 'crop' your viewer while shooting, you may want to be able to adjust the cropping per shot. Hence the use of a mask and adjust the mask placement for best composition of the image.

I would have calculated a mask based on 1920(wide)/1.85 = 1038(high) pixels, rounded to the nearest integer value... There may be some 'processing' reasons to make the numbers more 'powers of 2' compatible... but other than that... (such as 1024, which would be a nice power of 2... yield an effective aspect ratio of 1.875:1.)
 
Here's the math for figuring out any aspect ratio for any footage.

Divide the aspect ratio you have, in this case 16 / 9. You get 1.77777. Now divide that by the aspect ratio you want, in this case 1.85, and you get .96. Multiple that by 100 and the new aspect ratio needs to be 96% of the original aspect ratio. This means 4% has to be cropped off, usually divided evenly between top and bottom (2% each). You can apply a 2% top and bottom crop using the Crop effect if you intend to go to broadcast or disk (DVD or Blu-ray). Or you can crop during export for a computer file.

So for the computer file, how many pixels to crop? Well, 2% of 1080 is 21.6, which we have to round out to 22. So crop 22 pixels top and bottom. This leaves us with 1920/1036=1.85

To keep things a little more encoding friendly (meaning divisible by 8), you can use 1920/1040, which gives you an aspect ratio of 1.846.
 
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Is there a reason why you wouldn't just set your sequence settings to the pixel size you want and then just position your video up and down if you want a different vertical crop / position?
 
I'm supposed to work off a 1920/1080 sequence? It seemed to work if I used crop effect to crop 9.6% of the top and 9.6% off the bottom as opposed to 2%. Or am I supposed to work off a different type of sequence and then crop 2% because on the 1920/1080 sequence barely anything is cropped out with 2%.
 
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connectivitygroup said:
Is there a reason why you wouldn't just set your sequence settings to the pixel size you want and then just position your video up and down if you want a different vertical crop / position?
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I would love to do that but i don't know exactly how to do that. I can create a 1920/1036 sequence but I can't set the PAR to what it needs to be. I guess?
 
siberia88 said:
I would love to do that but i don't know exactly how to do that. I can create a 1920/1036 sequence but I can't set the PAR to what it needs to be. I guess?
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Your PAR, Pixel Aspect Ratio, should be square, 1:1 for HD... that has nothing to do with the frame aspect ratio of 1.85:1, or 4:3, or 2.39:1, etc...

The only time you need to worry about PAR is if you are going to SD TV formats, and the PAR values for PAL, NTSC, are not 'square' (and different from each other...).

The difference between 16:9, that is 1.77:1, to 1.83:1 is 'very small'... but if you need to have it be 1.85... you need to make that small adjustment.

I took you request to be in the direction of needing a 'mask', but yes you could set the sequence parameters to be 1920x1036, then as you bring your clip, slide the 1.77:1 HD material up or down for best cropping.

Upon output, say burning a Blueray disk, you could let the Encore 'letter box' the output appropriately for HD viewing on standard HD screens.

Don't know how 'film out' works, but I would imagine that the process would be to print your 1.85:1 formated media onto a standard film template, and as such needs no 'letterboxing'.
 
Is there a reason why you wouldn't just set your sequence settings to the pixel size you want and then just position your video up and down if you want a different vertical crop / position?
Click to expand...

As a general rule (and for better performance), work in a sequence that matches your footage. Crop upon export.
 
on the 1920/1080 sequence barely anything is cropped out with 2%.
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That's because there very little difference between 1.77 and 1.85. The 2% top and bottom is correct (4% total). You can change that if you like, but the result will no longer be 1.85:1.
 
I was going by the counting leader rings but I guess I was doing that incorrectly. You are all right of course. How do you properly crop upon export? Thank you.
 
Jim Simon said:
As a general rule (and for better performance), work in a sequence that matches your footage. Crop upon export.
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Yes. But I think that sort of presumes that the person doing the camera work, had put in a correct template onto their viewing screen. Otherwise, what you see is what you may not get...
 
How do you properly crop upon export?
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That depends on how you're exporting. If for disk, use the Crop effect, as disks will require the full picture height. If for computer or web playback, use the Cropping feature in the export dialog and set your resolution accordingly.
 
If you can find the presets/templates in the Premiere Pro titles, under matting there is a "letterbox" setting there. You could then adjust them as you see fit.
 
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