Question concerning shooting in Letterbox Mode w/ DVX 100B

[Dub-Machine]

Hi all,

Totally a newbie question so bare with me. I've just started a doc and have about 10 hours shoot and a rough 20 min segment put together. I shoot the whole 10 hours in the letterbox mode on my DVX 100B. The client is now talking about possibly trying to get the final project in film festivals with the chance of also making a DVD available for purchase. I'm sure you all know what my next question(s) is going to be. Being that I have potentially to Blow up my footage to fit a film screen I also want to be able to offer different versions of the footage on DVD (ie ability to watch it in the 4:3 ratio with black bars, but I also want to offer a 16:9 ratio). And that is really were my questioning begins. From now on how should I be shooting this to accomplish those end results? I do not have the money for an Anomorphic Adapter at the moment so answer the questions as if this was not an option. According to Barry Greens book, Letter box mode is a better bet if you are going to blow up or up rez to HD. Any help from any of you will be greatly appreciated as I would rather head off a potential problem now then keep shooting and have a head ache in post. Hope all of you are having a great day. This place rocks the house.

Cheers,

Vic

 

[Macville]

If the B model is like my A model, your two options are Letterbox mode (4:3 with hard black bars) and squeeze mode. If you shoot letterbox then you have to scale up to fit in 16:9 DV. If you shoot squeeze, then it's already 16:9 DV without having to scale the footage up. I know that the squeeze mode isn't as good as using an optical adapter, but it still looks better than blowing up 4:3 letterboxed material.

I will say that if you've already shot stuff 4:3 letterbox, it scales up fairly well. I shot an entire feature film in 4:3 letterbox and had to scale it up for 16:9. It actually helped the film a little as it softened the picture.

Matthew