Widescreen or Letterbox ?

[rgdfilms]

I do not have the anamorphic lens. I want to achieve an image that gets the most out of the built in settings in terms of picture. What are the differences between widescreen and letterbox ? Do i get more picture with widscreen mode ? How do you guys overcome the stretched out feeling while composing your shots in widescreen mode ? Thanks

 

[Sirius_Doggy]

I've shot a lot of stuff lately in squeeze mode. After a while you don't even notice the image is squashed on the LCD. You get used to it.

 

[ulisses]

The widescreen is 720x480 but using a different pixel aspect, I have a compositing software and using a default 4x3 image over a 16x9 background, the top/bottom areas of the image are cutted, like letterbox, but no resolution scaled only a pixel aspect conversion... exporting it to a normal video file the image is squeezed vertically but looks better than default camera squeeze... I'll do a test and post shots comparing both methods (without using anamorphic lens).
The point here is: using letterbox and doing a pixel aspect convertion and not an image scale could be better ?

Ulisses