Mixed Aspect Ratios for Featurette

J

Joshua Provost

Veteran
My filmmaking buddies and I have completed seventeen short films since June 2004. We are in the planning stages of a DVD release that will include all of our short films. I would like to put together a featurette that will cover brief behind-the-scenes info on all of the films. It's not worth doing a piece up for each film (since many of them are only 3-5 minutes long), but over the course of seventeen films, we have some interesting experiences to relate (and just to document for your own enjoyment in the future). The featurette will include raw footage, completed footage, productions stills, and other artifacts we dig up.

So, my question is, how should I put this all together. Our early films featured a lot of 60i to 24p conversion, so to bring in the raw footage, I plan to work in a 60i timeline and include all 24p footage with 2:3 pulldown.

The tougher question is what aspect ratio to work in. 13 of the films are widescreen, 4 of them are fullscreen. I have to make a decision between letterboxing the 16:9 films, or pillarboxing the 4:3 films. I'd hate to have a final featurette that was 4:3, since a lot of people I know have switched to 16:9 HDTV's, but I also don't see pillarboxing that much, either.

So, any suggestions? Do the 13 16:9 films outweigh the 4 4:3 films? Should that be the deciding factor?
 
Pillarboxing happens every time you watch broadcast TV on your widescreen set. Unless, of course, you are committing the unpardonable crime of stretching the 4:3 NTSC signal to fit your 16:9 (or 16:10, as I've found most of them to be) TV.

So, people should be pretty much used to it. It'd be a shame to shrink your 16:9 footage to fit into a 4:3 frame with letterboxes when the 4:3 footage fits so nicely into the center of a 16:9 frame.

That's at least the way I'd do it.
 
You can just create seperate tracks in the DVD and not have to worry about which to work in. Work in both. :P
 
The actual films on the DVD will be native 16:9 and 4:3 depending on which they are. However, the featurette will be a single film in and of itself that will combine both aspects, thus the tough decision of which format the featurette will be in.

I guess in the end, I'd rather sacrifice my 4:3 films to pillarboxing, than mess with my 16:9 films.

Thanks,
Josh
 
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