letterbox, 16.9, anamorphic and a squashed head!

R

redhighway

Member
Here we go again. I am shooting with a panasonic dvx100b European pal model. I am shooting in 25p as it is pal. The gamma is cinelike v. The matrix is cinelike. The v detail is thin. The aspect converter is letterbox. I've just uploaded a teaser to the films website, www.manwhowalked.com and a friend has said that the actors head appears squashed and even though I want a 16.9 end product it should't appear like this. Have I got the settings wrong for a film that when finished I would like to see in widescreen 16.9 without black bars at the sides, top and bottom yes, sides No. Help
 
You should useaspect converter 'squeeze-mode' while filming, then import that in a 16:9 timeline and work from there on the project. That will give you what you are trying to get now.
 
How you export also matters. You have to make sure you're exporting with the correct aspect ratio and pixel aspect ratio.
 
First of all Anomie, I can't change now I'm halfway through the film, or can I ? second, David, help what aspect ratio should I export in and what pixel aspect ratio? I'm not getting that many options on my edit suit and to top it off I'm now having trouble again putting footage onto a dvd that will play on my dvd player, please help
 
redhighway said:
second, David, help what aspect ratio should I export in and what pixel aspect ratio? I'm not getting that many options on my edit suit and to top it off I'm now having trouble again putting footage onto a dvd that will play on my dvd player, please help
Click to expand...
What are you editing with?
 
Oh, yeah. You are right. The way you film (squeeze or letterboxed) is something in general, but not what you need right now. Looking at the trailer I think you have put letterboxed footage (which is 4:3) in a 16:9 timeline. To fix that you need to put everything in a 4:3 timeline. That prevents stretching out enough. But then you have the black bars around it (on the sides because it is a 4:3 frame and on the top and the bottom because that is part of the frame. Next trick would be to put the whole movie in a 16:9 timeline, zoom in and crop the bars at the top and the bottom.

I have done a quick search on Roxio Pro 10, but found nothing helpfull.

It's a consumer program, probably far less possibilities compared to the pro $tuff. I use a consumer program myself (unfortunately): Corel VideoStudio 12. In that program I am able to do the cropping trick, with a small work-around. Maybe you can do the same in Roxio: I open a 16:9 timeline and place the footage I want to crop in the second overlay track. There I shows as a smal 4:3 picture in the center of the preview screen. In the previewscreen I can resize within the 16:9 frame of the timeline. After that I just have to render/export it as a DV or mpeg (or whatever type) file. After that the new file will be sized and played the way you want it to. But you lose some resolution and in some cases that shows (horizontal lines are the worst in my experience).

Hope this helps!
 
Cheers for the help, think I'm just going to have to live with it now because I don't want to lose any resolution. I like the look myself but it's other people that have picked up on it. Is it wrong to put a film out there and try and festival it when it's been shot in this mode? I don't know, Cheers J
 
To use 4:3 letterboxed on a 16:9 time line: Zoom in 1.33% and you will fill the 16:9 frame.

You will not lose resolution really compared to squeeze. Adam Wilt did a comparison years ago about this. Due to the way the DV codec compresses an image, the black bars take up very little bandwidth so it was negligible in the difference between a squeezed image and a letterboxed one blown up to fit on a 16:9 timeline.

At least that is what my foggy memory is telling me. I could be off a tad.
 
Last edited:
Hi Denwa, not sure that's going to help. I'm not trying to fill the frame, just trying to lose the squashed look, I'll try it and get back to you , cheers
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top