Turning 16:9 into letterbox for youtube/web upload

K

Krunko

Well-known member
I don't want youtube to butcher my image ratio, so how can I take my 16:9 video and export it in compressor in letterbox mode. If I just export regular 4:3 it stretches the image.

Yeah I know this is probably a newb question, sorry. I did a forum search and didn't find anything except how to do the opposite.

Thanks!
 
I have done this a couple of times on youtube with good results. It's relatively easy. My source was a squeeze footage on FCP and all I had to do was to use the 1.78 (16/9) ratio to calculate the vertical resolution for the final image. I use 320 as my horizontal which is what youtube needed and 320 divided by 1.78 should give around 180 (rounded up) to make a 16 by 9 ratio footage (of course with no letterbox). The final footage is 320x180 (no letterbox) from compressor. In youtube, the letterbox effect is automatically added.

Check out some samples at :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtSmYFP5m_w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUrc0rx9l58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyFHDxu4qx4

All were shot with squeeze mode and loaded into FCP and output using the above ratio for youtube.
 
Those look great...in fact, what are you using besides a dvx100. Are you doing color correction in some other program other than FCP? The colors look awesome. Is that in Indonesia or something?
 
Thanks krunko. The DVX was set to 25p of course (I am in the PAL region) and I started with the basic F5, F6 settings and tweaked a bit here and there. My shutter was set to off. I didn't use any mattebox for filters and grads. No 35mm adaptor were used (stock DVX lens purely).

The footage was of course doctored in post (magic bullet in FCP and the new Apple Color). Btw, I live in Brunei Darussalam (South East Asia), 3 hours from Indonesia by flight.

The compressor setting were H264 if I remember correctly. The bitrate was around 1600kpbs. No harm putting in 2000kbps. Of course youtube would bring that down anyway.

Good luck and do post up some scene of yours to share. Would be nice to see that !

Cheers !
 
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