Question on the right technique for a true widescreen aspect ratio...

P

P.S.T.

Active member
Hello all, I shot a wedding footage in 4:3 in SD on an XL2. I made this quick decision because I was afraid that the widescreen option would just stretch the image and not give me a true widescreen aspect ratio. Was this wrong? I went off of what I read in a book. According to it, even 35 mm film is shot in 4:3 and later cut into the desired aspect ratio. From what I sense, not even HD cameras shoot in true widescreen and I sense that it has something to do with the lens. I know it's easier to just choose the 16:9 option in the camera and simply import into a 16:9 project but I was wondering if what I'm doing is a better approach. I'm still stuck on how to convert my 4:3 footage into 16:9. What I have done is just import the footage into a 16:9 project in premiere and enlarge the image until all the black bars are gone. Is there a way to just crop the footage? The way I described that I did it seems to mess up the resolution a bit even though premiere does a good job of trying to correct it.(I mean it's not noticeable as far as I know but I still want to know if there's another way).I know I could crop the 4:3 footage into 16:9 in a 4:3 project but I think it'll just screw everything up because the DVD player will still interpret the footage as 4:3 and will leave black bars around the whole project.

here's a demo of 16:9 footage being cropped into what looks to be 2:45:1 (look at around minute 1:45)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32d-ofwa_yA

How did he do that^^^^

thanks guys
 
1. It is usually the lens that contributes to the widescreen ratio.

2. The XL-2 actually shoots true 16x9, test it yourself by recording in either ratio.

3. Why wouldn't HD cameras shoot true 16x9? Or rather, what proof do you have of this?

4. Yes, a lot of 35mm films are indeed matted (particularly Super35), but this is not always the case. It's important to realize though, that the difference in cropping (in terms of resolution) is several orders of magnitude greater than an SD crop. As long as the director chooses the framing, it's fine.

5. I'm a little lost on your last bit with DVD aspect ratios and letterboxing. There's only two DVD-legal aspect ratios allowed: 4x3 and 16x9 (There's others, but they're not in the DVD spec), but if you leave bars in your project, that is, crop to 16x9, but leave it within a 4x3 space, technically speaking the image is 4x3.

6. He did it by cropping the image and leaving it in a 16x9 window, like I described above with 4x3 space. A theatrical movie will likely never use this method, but for video masters, they will, since no consumer format natively supports anything wider than 16x9.
 
Actually, what I have read is that the only way any video camera can shoot true 16:9 is if it had a 16:9 CCD chip and I think the HVX doesn't have one....I highly doubt the XL2 has one. I think the Red Camera is one of the few that does. What you said in #5 answers my question. So is the only way to convert my 4:3 footage to 16:9 is by doing what I mentioned? By zooming in a bit in a 16:9 project?

Thanks
 
Even if the CCD isn't 16x9, that hardly matters since the footage the XL-2 outputs is wider in 16x9 than 4x3. All that would mean is that the XL-2 crops in two directions to achieve 4x3, but only one to achieve 16x9. On top of that, an in-camera crop would be superior, as it is done before color subsampling and compression. Just shoot it 16x9.
 
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