Nifty Squeeze Mode manipulation

raybog

raybog

Member
I gotta say, I've never seen this before...

Firstly, check out these images:

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a100/DorkmanScott/monkey/pawscratch.jpg
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a100/DorkmanScott/monkey/shadow.jpg
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a100/DorkmanScott/monkey/itworks.jpg
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a100/DorkmanScott/monkey/weep.jpg
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a100/DorkmanScott/monkey/paw.jpg

These images where taken from a short film called The Monkey's Paw which was filmed on a DVX100A WITHOUT A PRICEY ANAMORPHIC LENS .

Yeah, no anamorphic lens. How super wide and super sharp do those screen grabs look? I'm impressed.

I should mention that had nothing to do with The Monkey's Paw, and it's being pimped as we type over at the Jedi Council if anyone cares to read the info straight from the horses' mouth.

Anyway, here's how DP achieved those faux 16x9 images:

As mentioned, we filmed in 16x9 mode, which has a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2, creating an effective resolution of approximately 854x480, by stretching the image horizontally instead of squashing it vertically into the 16x9 ratio.

I always liked doing so with my PAL camera, as it created an image with an effective resolution of 1024x576.

The DVX does have a 16x9 anamorphic shooting mode, which creates a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2, as opposed to the standard NTSC aspect of 0.9.

Multiplying 1.2 by 720, gets approximately 854. So placing the 1.2 aspect 720x480 footage into a square-pixel 854x480 composition in AE stretches the footage out to fill the full space.

It's not a native or true 16x9 image, but it's effectively 16x9, and few if any people could tell the difference just watching it.

Then, of course, as I prefer 2.35 it's further matted down to 854x364.
Click to expand...
Colour me impressed. I'm really interested in using this shooting method on my next short.

I don't fully understand the science, so can anyone see any problems with shooting footage like this? What are the pro's and con's of shooting footage this way? I can't fault the quality of those images...

I think this is pretty interesting.
 
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Dude, that lady was in my friends last short film.
I also did a scene with her because we were short an actor.
Small world.


-BillP
 
I think those look pretty sweet. Im trying to figure out how to achieve 2.35:1 as well. If anyone knows how to do this on a pc with adobe premier (or some other pc applications) please let me and the poster of this thread know. :)
 
Please forgive me, but I must be missing something. All he "did" was convert anamorphic widescreen DV to square pixel. He doesn't gain anything by doing this except get a square pixel version of his footage which is better for web distribution. If I read that right, he shot in squeeze mode, which will automatically uprezz the 360 vertical lines from the 4:3 image into a 720x480 image with PAR=1.2. Then he converted it to sq. pixels. What's the big deal? The only reason to convert to sq. pixels is for web delivery via QT or WMV or something like that (and even that isn't needed these days). As for even wider than 16:9, you only have one choice really, matte a 16:9 image with letterboxed black bars (or further matte a 4:3 image with even bigger black bars than 16:9 letterboxing would have).
 
I don't see the what here. Those grabs look no better than cropped/uprezzed 4:3 would.

Mostly because that's the mathematical equivalent of what was actually done.
 
I think these are a bit lack luster as well. I would actually like to see more anamorphic footage on this forum for shooting 2.35:1 but not loosing over half your resolution...
 
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