disjecta
Lucky Duck
I was going to name this post "The Poor Man's Anamorphic" but decided that would be misleading.
The goal here is to produce widescreen footage of stunning quality without the use of an anamorphic lens.
I must acknowledge my conversation with IAMLOSER who inspired me to experiment.
You will need a program called Photozoom Pro to do this. It's available on the Web as a demo.
My goal is to start off with the highest quality footage possible from the DVX with just the fixed lens. My understanding is that if you are working in a 4x3 environment, footage that has been shot with the in-camera letterbox is not actually compromised regarding resolution. The camera just masks the actual 4x3 footage and performs no digital stretching or other modification. (Barry, is this correct?).
Here are the steps:
1. Shoot some footage using the in-camera letterbox.
2. Capture into a 4x3 project in your NLE and edit the piece to where you are happy with it.
3. Export the finished timeline as uncompressed TIFF frames.
4. Launch Photozoom Pro and click the NEW BATCH button.
5. Set the NEW SIZE to 864 pixels wide and 616 pixels high (make sure that MAINTAIN ASPECT RATIO is deselected). The 864 gives you a true widescreen width and the 616 height stretches the frame just high enough so that when you import the new frames into a 16x9 project, the letterbox disappears and the correct ratio is displayed. Also choose the default S-SPLINE for the resize method.
6. Run the new batch in Photozoom Pro and choose a folder to dump the newly-sized frames into. These new frames are no longer anamorphic because you have sized them exactly to the widescreen spec. (note: there is a limitation of 1170 frames in Photozoom's batch processing so you may have to do multiple batches, depending on the length of your piece)
7. When the batch is finished processing, open up a new 16x9 project in your NLE and import the new TIFF frames as a sequence. Your NLE should create a single video file for you to work with.
8. There should be no need to interpret the footage. It should stay at square pixels and fit in your widescreen window perfectly.
9. Import your original letterbox footage for comparison (you will need to stretch it vertically by about 129% to fit in the widescreen window).
10. Render the timeline with both files and take a look at the difference, it is truly stunning.
Photozoom Pro adds sharpness to your original frame but it's not a video sharpness that's created, it's more like a "high-quality-telecined-35mm-transfer" look. Kind of like what you see on nicely produced movie DVDs.
Photozoom does a fantastic job of resizing the original 4x3 to 16x9 and the overall look just blew me away. The render time will kill you (about 6 seconds per frame on a 1.8ghz computer) but, like Magic Bullet, it's worth it.
The primary benefit of this method over using the anamorphic lens is that you still maintain full control over exposure and depth of field.
You can also use this method on anamorphic-originated footage...it will make it look sharper and there is an implied resolution gain (not actual). The only thing you would change for this in the method above is the resizing dimensions. In this case, you would be resizing to 864 pixels wide by 480 pixels high.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with whoever is interested and run it by Barry to see if some of my assumptions are correct, particularly regarding the lack of quality loss using letterbox mode on a 4x3 timeline.
The goal here is to produce widescreen footage of stunning quality without the use of an anamorphic lens.
I must acknowledge my conversation with IAMLOSER who inspired me to experiment.
You will need a program called Photozoom Pro to do this. It's available on the Web as a demo.
My goal is to start off with the highest quality footage possible from the DVX with just the fixed lens. My understanding is that if you are working in a 4x3 environment, footage that has been shot with the in-camera letterbox is not actually compromised regarding resolution. The camera just masks the actual 4x3 footage and performs no digital stretching or other modification. (Barry, is this correct?).
Here are the steps:
1. Shoot some footage using the in-camera letterbox.
2. Capture into a 4x3 project in your NLE and edit the piece to where you are happy with it.
3. Export the finished timeline as uncompressed TIFF frames.
4. Launch Photozoom Pro and click the NEW BATCH button.
5. Set the NEW SIZE to 864 pixels wide and 616 pixels high (make sure that MAINTAIN ASPECT RATIO is deselected). The 864 gives you a true widescreen width and the 616 height stretches the frame just high enough so that when you import the new frames into a 16x9 project, the letterbox disappears and the correct ratio is displayed. Also choose the default S-SPLINE for the resize method.
6. Run the new batch in Photozoom Pro and choose a folder to dump the newly-sized frames into. These new frames are no longer anamorphic because you have sized them exactly to the widescreen spec. (note: there is a limitation of 1170 frames in Photozoom's batch processing so you may have to do multiple batches, depending on the length of your piece)
7. When the batch is finished processing, open up a new 16x9 project in your NLE and import the new TIFF frames as a sequence. Your NLE should create a single video file for you to work with.
8. There should be no need to interpret the footage. It should stay at square pixels and fit in your widescreen window perfectly.
9. Import your original letterbox footage for comparison (you will need to stretch it vertically by about 129% to fit in the widescreen window).
10. Render the timeline with both files and take a look at the difference, it is truly stunning.
Photozoom Pro adds sharpness to your original frame but it's not a video sharpness that's created, it's more like a "high-quality-telecined-35mm-transfer" look. Kind of like what you see on nicely produced movie DVDs.
Photozoom does a fantastic job of resizing the original 4x3 to 16x9 and the overall look just blew me away. The render time will kill you (about 6 seconds per frame on a 1.8ghz computer) but, like Magic Bullet, it's worth it.
The primary benefit of this method over using the anamorphic lens is that you still maintain full control over exposure and depth of field.
You can also use this method on anamorphic-originated footage...it will make it look sharper and there is an implied resolution gain (not actual). The only thing you would change for this in the method above is the resizing dimensions. In this case, you would be resizing to 864 pixels wide by 480 pixels high.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with whoever is interested and run it by Barry to see if some of my assumptions are correct, particularly regarding the lack of quality loss using letterbox mode on a 4x3 timeline.
(Shhh, don't tell XL2 users about this.) 
