Shooting format

E

EyenEye

Member
Hi guys,
I'm in the UK. Have read some of your postings about 16:9 etc. Great great stuff.

I have a pretty simple question. I'm shooting tomorrow and am waiting to find out whether its 16:9 or 4:3. 4:3 is self explanatory as normal. I would like to shoot letterbox if I have to do 16:9. Without editing or any other software, just how far away is letterbox from 16:9 as I have seen stuff shot with letterbox and hardly noticed a difference !

So, in short, normal is 4:3 but is squeeze or letterbox CLOSER to 16:9 (without any form of uprezzing etc etc) ?

Any prompt replies supremely appreciated !

thanks guys
N.
 
Depends a lot on what your application for it is going to be. Most times I like to use the DVX's squeeze mode, but a while back I remembered reading somewhere that letterbox is better if you're going for some sort of theatrical release, or are planning on going to film festivals. Any truth to that rumor?
 
In case you haven't read it already, you might want to check out

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=92724

In that thread I tried to summarize how to get the best quality images in 16:9 anamorphic, without an anamorphic lens, based on information gathered from more than hundreds of other posts on this forum.

There's also some darn good other opinions in that thread and the conclusion is... ah, no, I won't spoil the ending for you.
 
interesting. I've never used squeeze, only letterbox. A friend, when asked to use dvx's, shoots letterbox all the time when asked for 16:9, even for major TV stations, and there has never been a problem with it. I shoot letterbox for my corporate gigs and have never had any negative feedback from clients or anyone who edited the footage. I know obviously letterbox is 4:3 with black bars and widescreen is stretched horizontally, but it seems safe to say the actual difference in picture is pretty minimal ???
 
4:3 LETTERBOX is perfect for stuff destined for TV, since all SD broadcast is 4:3. If you shot SQUEEZE you'd have to reformat it to deliver to the network anyway.
 
None that I am aware of. SD broadcast is 4:3; HD broadcast is 16:9. Anything I have shot in 16:9 and needed to hand over for SD broadcast had to be converted to 4:3 letterbox. If I didn't do it, the network would do the conversion (taking a quality hit due to the resizing/recompression), or worse yet, would play the 16:9 anamorphic as stretched 4:3.
 
Joshua Provost said:
[...] or worse yet, would play the 16:9 anamorphic as stretched 4:3.
Click to expand...
This actually happened today to a commercial I've worked on. As per request, we delivered uncompressed 16:9 anamorphic to the customer who, according to themselves, had the skills to make proper format changes when delivering to different media.

However, I got a call from a panicky customer today that had seen their commercial in stretched 4:3 and they couldn't figure out why. After some quick research, it turned out that the network didn't do anamorphic broadcast for that "commercial package" and they hadn't even bothered telling their customer that their commercial would air in stretched format...
 
What if you're just outputting to DVD for distribution? Most TV's aren't widescreen, so how do you format it to play correctly from a home dvd system if you've shot with squeeze? I've always done letterbox and have never had to do any formatting in post. But I'm thinking about trying squeeze and I want to make sure I know how to get it to play correctly on your typical TV.
 
Shooting squeeze would be just fine. You can author a dvd that will have a 16:9 flag on it thus when it is played on a hd tv it display it properly in 16:9 and on a "home dvd system" it will automaticaly letterbox it.
 
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