Importing 4x3 vids into a 16x9 project

[mattbrown]

I'm looking into buying Premiere as I already have AE 6.5. Here's my question before I leap on the purchase. I want to create a 16x9 project. I have a lot of footage shot with my Panny GS500 in 16x9. I also have some older 4x3 footage shot on 8mm that I will want to incorporate into the project, but zoom in/crop the 4x3 footage into 16x9 (understanding this will have resolution side effects) Can Premiere or Premiere Pro easily do this? I have a running thread on the same topic in the General NLE forum.

Matt

PS - Last night I tried to put the 4x3 footage into a 16x9 AE composition, do the zoom and rerender. I guess the input file (2hours long) was too much for AE to handle and it shut down.

 

[mikkowilson]

Yup, both Premiere Elements and Premiere Pro will handle this simply:
When you bring in a clip into Premiere, it will read it's aspect ratio and resolution and deal with it in it's native size. You can then use the simple "motion" controls - mostly "scale" - to adjust the size of the incoming file into the final 16:9 output.

For example if you are bringing in native ("Squeeze")16:9 footage, Premiere will of course treat it as sutch and you'll be ready to go.
If you bring in 4:3 footage it'll appear pillarboxed as 4:3 in the 16:9 window. Then you can sale it up untill it fills the screen horizontally - of course cutting off the top an bottom in the process. You can use the Vertical Position in the Motion controls to slide the frame up and down to decide what parts top & bottom you chop off.
If you bring in 4:3 footage that contains a 16:9 letterbox, premiere will still treat it as the 4:3 video it actually is. Then, just as above, zoom it in untill the sides fill the screen; this will crop off the letterbox bars and the footage should fill the screen vertically too.

Of course, as you mentioned, any time that you scale the footage, you will begin to impact your video resolution - especially when "zooming in" video to make it larger than the original.

- Mikko