letterbox

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DVX100Shooter

Veteran
How do you change the color of the letterbox? Instead of black I might want white or whatever or instead of a color I might want footage of video...I saw a Jamie Foxx video yesterday that was letterboxed in the beginning and it was edited this way with footage at the top and bottom. It looked awkward though! LOL!
 
You're adding a widescreen matte to the footage... right?

Double click the widescreen matte before applying and adjust the color to whatever you wish it to be... then drag and drop.

Or if you've already applied the matte, double click each and any clip you applied the matte too and switch the color under the filters tab.
 
to do it fast, there are plugins by Eureka, vol. 5 that will do that.

agreed though, change the color is a little punky.
 
Here is an explanation I got to create a widescreen matte with more control:

On a new video track, lay down a Matte: Color from the Video Generators. Make it the entire length of your sequence. You can change the color in the Contol tab in the Viewer. (On my system, Gray seems to be the default, so I change it to Black for the standard widescreen bars.) Then apply this filter:

Video FIlters / Matte / Mask Shape

In the Filter tab for the Mask Shape choose Rectangle as the shape, set the Horiz. to 100, and the Vert. to 80 (or experiment to find what works best for you i.e. 74.9). (What's obviously nice about this method is if you change your mind, this is now one setting instead of hundreds.) Then make sure to check the Invert check-box. Ta-da! A custom widescreen matte with sharp edges.

Of course you get a "wider screen" effect by making the Vert. number smaller, i.e. 74.9.


I have found that Horizontal at 100 and Vertical at 80 works great for my applications.
 
When I apply a widescreen matte over my footage, the footage gets brighter! Its like some sort of gamma or pedestal shift. I only see this effect on my video monitor not on the computer monitor. Anyone else have this problem?
 
Actually When I was doing some color correction I stumbled on a way to change the letterbox that way! I had to actually temporarily take the bars off the screen because it was messing me up. So I did the color correction then added the bars back when I was done. But I changed those bars from black to blue to green! LOL!
 
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