Please forgive me for the question I'm about to ask. I'm sure its been asked many times here, but I have a terrible memory and a burning case of ADD. Lets say you shoot footage with the XL2 in 16:9 mode. After bringing the footage into your NLE ..and working whatever magic there is to work .......will you be able to get the footage to display in letterbox on a standard 4:3 tv?


thanks,

chris

This situation would be the same as any anamorphic 16:9, regardless of what camera you used. If you burn the footage onto a DVD then the DVD player will automatically letterbox it for people that have 4:3 TV's. If you are playing back directly from the camera, sending video directly from your computerr, or playing from VHS tape, the anamorphic video would not be letterboxed on a 4:3 TV (with the exception of some of the newer, larger, more expensive sets that have this ability). In this case you would need to create a separate letterboxed version of your video for 4:3. If you're working in FCP then you could create a new 4:3 sequence and drop your 16:9 sequence into. That would automatically letterbox it, but of course a render would be required and you'd end up with two different versions of the video.

In short, the XL-2 has a higher resolution way of creating the 16:9 image but what it writes to tape is still just 720x480 anamorphic 16:9, just like the XL-1s, GL-2, PD-150, VX-2000, etc. From the standpoint of editing and playing the video all these cameras could be treated the same. The difference would be in the quality of the image.