So.. Anyone else shoot 16:9 then letterbox it in post?

Wilbur Eddings

Wilbur Eddings

Well-known member
I do... somehow it just looks awesome to me!

'Specially wide landscapes or extreme close ups. It makes my low budget Video poo poo film feel like William Munney might show up at any moment!

If our local TV stations were not so full of crap, ever music vid from Wilbur would be letterboxed!

Anyone else guilty of so heinous a transgression?
 
You mean crop it to a wider aspect ratio than 16:9? Like 2.35:1 or 2.40:1? I'd venture to guess everyone does if it's appropriate, if they want that kind of a cinemascope feel.

Or do you mean shooting 16:9 and then putting it in a 4:3 frame? If so, then no, not since widescreen TVs became the norm.
 
David Jimerson said:
You mean crop it to a wider aspect ratio than 16:9? Like 2.35:1 or 2.40:1? I'd venture to guess everyone does if it's appropriate, if they want that kind of a cinemascope feel.

Or do you mean shooting 16:9 and then putting it in a 4:3 frame? If so, then no, not since widescreen TVs became the norm.
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2.35:1 or 2.40:1 etc.

So in love with the old Clint Eastwood flicks, somehow it makes everything feel more 'storylike' to me. Even newer stuff with tons of CGI :)

Yet the Dark night with those IMAX tidbits managed blow my mind when it opened up like that!

*sigh*

Really lve movies.. maybe a little too much.. heh heh

J Davis said:
why do you see it as heinous or label it a transgression?
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I don't, just got my ass handed to me in a recent email from a TV station for letterboxing a music video.

;)
 
Presume you mean shooting 16:9 then adding black mask/bars to give the classic 2:35:1 'scope' look?

I have done in the past - but always made sure to frame the shots to maximise the look. Now, I prefer shooting on anamorphics - as that gives the authentic look/feel of the 60's/70's & 80's movies I grew up watching & loving. By product of real Ana lenses is the lens flare (now sooooooo overused it's becoming cliche) and stuff like nice ovular bokeh (so long as you're using front of lens anamorphics - rear ana's don't give the ovular look).

The kicker for me is that anamorphics offer the unique optical look - with differing horizontal & vertical FOV's - so a 35mm (cine prime lens) is vertically a 35mm but horizontally 17.5 - or a 50mm is 25mm horizontally etc. You get a very different look - and a wide feel from a non wide lens, if that makes sense? In normal spherical lenses, you wouldn't call a 35mm that wide - but the 17.5mm horizontal is wide :)

This is why 2:35:1/widescreen movies always have that 'wide' & epic feel... and we just see them as cinematic. Adding bars/reframing to 'scope' & forcing your eyes (and the viewers) to see the wider 'vista' just helps to sell content as more 'movie-like' - that's the reason it's so popular in pop promos & now is quite normal for Op's stuff posted on Vimeo etc when the film look is desired.
 
MadMonkFish said:
Presume you mean shooting 16:9 then adding black mask/bars to give the classic 2:35:1 'scope' look?

I have done in the past - but always made sure to frame the shots to maximise the look. Now, I prefer shooting on anamorphics - as that gives the authentic look/feel of the 60's/70's & 80's movies I grew up watching & loving. By product of real Ana lenses is the lens flare (now sooooooo overused it's becoming cliche) and stuff like nice ovular bokeh (so long as you're using front of lens anamorphics - rear ana's don't give the ovular look).

The kicker for me is that anamorphics offer the unique optical look - with differing horizontal & vertical FOV's - so a 35mm (cine prime lens) is vertically a 35mm but horizontally 17.5 - or a 50mm is 25mm horizontally etc. You get a very different look - and a wide feel from a non wide lens, if that makes sense? In normal spherical lenses, you wouldn't call a 35mm that wide - but the 17.5mm horizontal is wide :)

This is why 2:35:1/widescreen movies always have that 'wide' & epic feel... and we just see them as cinematic. Adding bars/reframing to 'scope' & forcing your eyes (and the viewers) to see the wider 'vista' just helps to sell content as more 'movie-like' - that's the reason it's so popular in pop promos & now is quite normal for Op's stuff posted on Vimeo etc when the film look is desired.
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I didn't understand half of that, yet, strangely, I feel myself all aglow with happy feelings.
 
Wilbur Eddings said:
I didn't understand half of that, yet, strangely, I feel myself all aglow with happy feelings.
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:)

Maybe that's your new found passion for shooting!

Just mention shooting real anamorphics to your DP - he'll either smile and be all for it - or give you 'the evils' & want to go 16:9 with hard mattes... I love the look of real anamorphic - but, if I can't go that way... the black bars creep in anyway!
 
MadMonkFish said:
:)Maybe that's your new found passion for shooting! Just mention shooting real anamorphics to your DP - he'll either smile and be all for it - or give you 'the evils' & want to go 16:9 with hard mattes... I love the look of real anamorphic - but, if I can't go that way... the black bars creep in anyway!
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So wish I had found film making when I was younger, somedays it feels like I wasted the first half of my life on pointless junk... Happy is the man who finds his passion!Don't you struggle with playback when you actually shoot anamorphic?
 
MadMonkFish said:
:)Maybe that's your new found passion for shooting! Just mention shooting real anamorphics to your DP - he'll either smile and be all for it - or give you 'the evils' & want to go 16:9 with hard mattes... I love the look of real anamorphic - but, if I can't go that way... the black bars creep in anyway!
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So wish I had found film making when I was younger, somedays it feels like I wasted the first half of my life on pointless junk... Happy is the man who finds his passion!Don't you struggle with playback when you actually shoot anamorphic?
 
Wilbur Eddings said:
I don't, just got my ass handed to me in a recent email from a TV station for letterboxing a music video.
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Okay now I understand and its my mistake for taking you literally with the terminology. There are actually two different things, cropping or windowing on the sensor and letter boxing. Because you can crop to 1:2.39 and deliver at that aspect ratio without letter boxing and there is nothing wrong with that.

Letter boxing in post to 16:9 is something you need to work out with the client, especially if its TV I would let them do it.

edit:
Letter boxing has also helped me reduce artifacts with YouTube and Vimeo - it gets rid of the horizontal 1 pixel green line that they add to the bottom of your 1:2.39 video
 
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Wilbur Eddings said:
So wish I had found film making when I was younger, somedays it feels like I wasted the first half of my life on pointless junk... Happy is the man who finds his passion!Don't you struggle with playback when you actually shoot anamorphic?
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I started off as a youngblood Director/Producer back in the late Eighties (member of the DGGB etc) but got pulled into CG (very early stuff on machines like Symbolics) as I was/am a sort of combination Art/Creative/Techical Director... creating IP's... so that pulled me away from live action storytelling (my first love!) and into animation then videogames and hybrid media etc.

Recently, I've been repositioning myself and returning to live action - prepping a number of projects that will be fun - the advantage of the wonderful digital world we live in now, is I can get PL Cine primes and stick them on digital cameras (from Red to GH1/2/7D right through to AF101 & FS100 etc) - 20 years ago, it was a nightmare of expense shooting on film... now we have all the tools and it's great to be able to appreciate how easy things have become.

I used to off & on-line edit on 3 machine Standard Def Betacam sp (2 machines so you could do a mix between them in an anologue mixer!) - long before SD Digibeta came along... and then the pain of telecine xfers to tape - with BITC for the off-line... arghhh. Now we have laptops that can handle HD editing - tech progression is great (back in 2002 - HD was the preserve of custom boxes like the Quantel iQ) now with the speed of hard drives and the march of technology, you've swung back into this field at just the right time, IMO.

Monitoring Ana is OK - depending on the cam used. Red allows for it - 35mm movie cams normally have a de-squeeze VF and most monitors (like the TVlogic or SmallHD) also allow for custom de-squeeze. When stuck without external monitoring or complex options, I have a couple of optical anamorphic de-squeezers (from Century - made back in 2001) that stick on any flip out LCD - they're not perfect (being about X1.7 rather than X2 in their correction factor), but they do the trick.

In terms of playback - it's fine if you have a monitor that'll do custom ratios. Trick is to frame knowing you'll loose about 2 sixths of your image (due to the X2 stretch being recorded to 16:9 sensors - not what Anamorphic was designed for). On location, if I really want to check stuff, I'd normally ask a DiT to pull them up on a laptop & view the clips on a timeline (you can do a quick adjust of the pixel aspect ratio that fixes the anamorphic stretch & then zoom in or crop the sides).

Edit wise, if the project is bound for higher than HD, shooting Red for Ana makes sense - and you need a decent system unless you're using proxies and re-linking for a grade & film out etc. For finishing HD Ana, it's simply the pixel aspect ratio of the footage thay needs a change, alongside any custom cropping/zooming. I find outputting via SDI to view on a grading monitor works in HD - if you view as SDI in SD (convert HD to SD in realtime) you can use the 16:9 squash mode that comes on grading monitors (and plasmas/LCD's etc)

Anyway - to wrap up this stoopidly long reply, last thing I'll say is, oddly, if you shot Ana for a short while, you sorta get used to seeing the vertical squeeze anyway - just the whole world seems oddly squished & flat when you wrap and start re-adjusting your eyes. Sort of squished eyes rather than square eyes! :)
 
I just shot a short film that will be cropped to 2:39. That decision was made by the director and me in preproduction, so I taped off my monitors with packing tape (you still want to be able to see the areas you are cropping out to allow you to move the camera with more awareness).

Not every film works with a 1:2.39 aspect ratio, but some really benefit from it, especially epics and action films, and your production design/art direction becomes even more important because you have less frame to fill with worthwhile information or more frame to fill if you shoot on true anamorphic lenses.
 
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