Hey Folks,
Can anyone tell me what is the best way to mask XL2 viewfinder for "fake" 16:9 ratio. I wanna shoot in 4:3 but letterbox it so that it gives the 16:9 look. Would a black electric wiring tape do the job?

I know that XL2 can shoot true 16:9. But I'm doing this way cuz of the fact most of my clients still own a 4:3 TV.

Thanks
Ram Purad

I believe you are thinking too hard on the subject. You can just shoot in 4:3 and then fake the letterbox in your editing program. Much easier!

What the?????

recording in 4:3 and then letterboxing????
You have 16:9 on your XL2!! Use it!
You record anamorph 16:9 on your XL2, get this into your edit program in a 16:9 sequence, when all edited you get your 16:9 sequence into a 4:3 sequence, this way you get a letterboxed sequence (if not you have to squeese you image to a 16:9 aspect ratio, but in FCP it's automaticly letterboxed)

When all rendered, you print it on tape, and you deliver a letterboxed 16:9 movie, but you used the whole CCD-area of the XL2.

Greets, Tim

Egads, yes, I echo Tim's statements. One of the greatest things about the XL2 is you don't have to do all that horrid taping off to get widescreen - it's built in!

Shoot and edit in 16:9, then nest inside a 4:3 sequence to achieve letterboxed widescreen inside 4:3.

I would love to know how to shoot 16:9 and squeze it to get 4:3 letter box. cause I am shooting this project that I would love to shoot 16: 9 but I can't because most of my viewers still have 4:3 tvs.

Actually, I believe Ram will get better quality results doing it his way, provided he only wants to have a letterboxed video on a 4:3 display.

If you shoot 4:3 and frame the shot for 16:9, you can add the letterbox bars in an NLE. Why is it better? Well it saves 2 rounds of resizing/resampling the video image. (i) When you shoot 16:9 the CCD is 960x480 (NTSC) and this is resampled to 720x480 before it is stored on the DV tape. (ii) When you export the 16:9 project as a 4:3 clip (or alternatively, when you add a 16:9 clip to a 4:3 project) the video is resampled again to fit the width of the 4:3 screen, which is where the letterbox bars are added.

By shooting 4:3 and staying in that format all the way, the picture area in the centre is never resized and will definitely be clearer as a result. I agree it's a bit of a hassle to have to tape the viewfinder screen, but it's not a daft idea. It will probably render faster in the NLE too.

Having said all the above, I would add that if Ram actually wants to have a video that will play 16:9 on a widescreen monitor, and letterboxed on a 4:3 monitor, then he should use the 16:9 mode on the XL2 instead of taping the viewfinder.

Richard

Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly are we supposed to letterbox 16:9 footage? I just finnished editing a movie (shot in 16:9 on the XL2) on which I was DP. I'm using Premiere Pro.

I exported to DVD using Adobe's exporter. Now, although I can see the movie automatically letterboxed through my DVD player, the director says he cannot see the movie in the 16:9 aspect ratio when watching it at home. It is cropped (not letterboxed). I figured this was his DVD player that did not recognize and properly letterbox the 16:9 ratio so I exported an other movie using the 4:3 option in Adobe Media Encoder but although the image is still properly letterboxed on my TV, it now looks like crap (blocky and full of artifacts).

So now I'm wondering what are the detailed steps I need to go through to export it in a 4:3 ratio so that it is properly letterboxed on any DVD player. Somebody above talked about nesting the 16:9 sequence into a 4:3 sequence. How exactly would you do something like this in Premiere? I tried importing the 16:9 edited sequence into a 4:3 timeline but all that does is crop the image (not letterbox it). There may be an obvious answer to this, but I do not know it.

enlightenment would be welcomed.

Yeah... I would like to know same thing as David. How do u nest a 16:9 footage in a 4:3 sequence to have letter box in premiere. Do u have to creat another 4:3 project and import the 16:9 footage into it? I have premiere pro 1.5 with Matrox RTX.100.

Even if v can do this way in premiere, I believe it has to go through some sort of rendering process. This is okay for a 30 mins of footage. But I do wedding videos, which is well over 2 hrs. So rendering the whole video can be a hassle.

Also if I do this way, will it loose any picture quality in the process of resampling as Richard stated?

Damn, only if all my clients have widescreen TVs. I will be using the 16:9 format in XL2 and providing the video to them in same format. Cuz of the stuggle between 4:3 and 16:9, I don't want my clients to comeback and say or v look skinny and stretched in our mom's TV. Alothough the brides may prefer to see them that way :-). 16:9 size output is my first step forward to achieve the film look.

Hi Richard,

My take is a little different: if I want to end up with a 720x360px image space via letterboxing on a 4:3 screen, I'd rather start with 960x480 and downsample, than start with 720x360.

The resampling of 960x480 off the CCD block in-camera to 720x480 is not a "hit" on image quality; it was engineered into the camera to deliver a most superb image. Quality-wise, the 4:3 image of the XL2 will at best be on-par with it, and some would argue slightly inferior (but still very good, of course) since it started on the CCD as only 720x480.

Placing the 720x480(16:9) file letter-box style into a 4:3 project will allow the entire image (480 px high) to be sampled down into the middle 3/4 (360px) of the 720x480(4:3) project, whereas letterboxing a 4:3 file to mask off the top and bottom will yield the 720x360 image space we want between the black bars.

Either way, the NLE has to do one render to make the final out a letterboxed file. I'd rather do my color correcting and other effects on the top-notch 720x480(16:9) and export uncompressed. That very clean file can then go into the 4:3 project. I don't believe that doing the masking and other effects in an originally 4:3 file to get those middle 360 pixels ready for export isgoing to be superior. So I agree with the majority in recommending that Ram take the easier, more flexible, and possibly slightly higher-quality path of shooting 16:9.

David,

All DVD players can read the aspect ratio flags, so that by itself shouldn't be why the image is cropped on your director's TV. But it is possible that his DVD player set up menu has the wrong aspect ratio entered for the TV (you have to tell the DVD player whether the TV is 16:9 or 4:3). Failing that...given that you were able to see your project properly on your DVD player and TV setup, I wonder if your director might have had his TV set to "expand" mode?

Richard's and my replies probably hint at most of what you're asking. If you want a 4:3 DVD with letterboxed image, here's the basic flow with PPro and Encore:
- Do your 16:9 work in a 16:9 project
- Export uncompressed (hope you have lots of hard drive space on a fast computer!)
- Import to a 4:3 project.
- If necessary, scale down to fit the width (use the fixed effects in the Effects Control window).
- Export to DVD with settings as desired.

I'm not too swift on DVD settings, so maybe someone else can chime in on optimizing the picture.

EDIT: Ram, I can't wait for 4:3 to go away, too! In the meantime, I shoot and edit in 16:9, then just letterbox what needs to be seen 4:3. Of course, some folks need to stay 4:3 for business purposes for now, but hopefully those days are numbered!

Cheers,

David,

All DVD players can read the aspect ratio flags, so that by itself shouldn't be why the image is cropped on your director's TV. But it is possible that his DVD player set up menu has the wrong aspect ratio entered for the TV (you have to tell the DVD player whether the TV is 16:9 or 4:3). Failing that...given that you were able to see your project properly on your DVD player and TV setup, I wonder if your director might have had his TV set to "expand" mode?

That's pretty much what I told the guy but he said there was no such settings on his TV nor DVD player so I figured there might be something wrong with my export settings. He's not the most techno savvy guy though, so I might have to go and take a look for myself.

Richard's and my replies probably hint at most of what you're asking. If you want a 4:3 DVD with letterboxed image, here's the basic flow with PPro and Encore:
- Do your 16:9 work in a 16:9 project
- Export uncompressed (hope you have lots of hard drive space on a fast computer!)
- Import to a 4:3 project.
- If necessary, scale down to fit the width (use the fixed effects in the Effects Control window).
- Export to DVD with settings as desired.

I see. I guess I'll try that, but I thought I could do it without going through the process or rendering it (uncompressed to boot) and then reimporting it in a 4:3 timeline.

I tried just importing the edited PPro sequence in the 4:3 timeline but the image is cropped and using the scale function only reduces the size of the cropped image (in other words, it stays 4:3, the image is irremediably cropped on the sides).

Hey Dave and Ram,

You don't HAVE to export the 16:9 as uncompressed, but that'll give the best quality. I make the assumption that most folks editing with PPro 1.5.1 have a system that can at least temporarily handle a big file that is intended only as an intermediate step. No doubt that's not true for everyone, but most.

I just opened up PPro and checked. In the Project>>Project Settings>>General dialog, if you checkmark "Scale clips to project dimensions when adding to sequence" a 16:9 file will automatically letterbox; no scaling required. If that setting is UNchecked, it will stretch vertically to fit the whole 4:3 frame.

I understand what you're saying Pete, I tried it and it works indeed. I just think it's a shame having to do a render which eats up 24MB/sec. of space, about 190GB for a feature (and uncompressed is the only choice when you're serious about preserving image quality of course).

I just don't understand why you can't just import the PPro sequence (xxx.ppj file) and adjust that. I tried, it doesn't work. It will letterbox a video file but not an ensemble of edited video files. Seems like a conceptual shortcoming to me.

Not to enter into platform battle, but Final Cut Pro can easily nest sequences (drag and drop one edited sequence into another). After Effects is able to do this easily as well. It's hard to believe Premiere doesn't support this.

By nesting a 16:9 anamorphic sequence inside a 4:3 sequence, FCP automatically does the right thing, and doesn't require exporting first. Just make sure to purge renders if you're not working uncompressed, so it's not double compressing DV25 format.

Also, if quality and hard drive space are both a concern, you can export an uncompressed-processed sequence straight out to Mpeg-2, without exporting a file first. This way you can apply color smoothing to rid the blocky artifacts in DV25 and get a better quality Mpeg-2 encode.

Again, I would definitely not shoot 4:3 and crop that to widescreen in post, when you have an XL2 with it's gorgeous 16:9 imaging path (with proper framing in your viewfinder - IMPORTANT), from which you can scale to a 4:3 image in post if need be.

If you were really paranoid about this scaling process, do the scaling on an uncompressed export of the edited piece in After Effects with it's superior scaling.

<<<-- Originally posted by Pete Bauer :

The resampling of 960x480 off the CCD block in-camera to 720x480 is not a "hit" on image quality; it was engineered into the camera to deliver a most superb image. Quality-wise, the 4:3 image of the XL2 will at best be on-par with it, and some would argue slightly inferior (but still very good, of course) since it started on the CCD as only 720x480.

-->>>

Hi Pete. I think we had a very similar discussion a couple of months back. :)

I still maintain that the 4:3 image from the XL2 is inherently better than the 16:9 image (without any artistic considerations of course). What needs to be remembered is that after downsampling (which is sure to downgrade the image to a certain extent), the 16:9 image now has the same number of horizontal pixels (720) to represent a larger screen width. Logically, the image quality has to suffer, and to my eyes the 16:9 image is definitely softer than the 4:3 one.

Look at it another way. The 4:3 setting uses the centre block of 720x480 CCD pixels. The 16:9 setting uses these exact same pixels, plus some more at the sides. Then it resamples the data from the larger array of pixels down to 720x480 resolution, but this data still has to represent the larger area. It just doesn't make sense (to me) that the downsampled image can be better than the 4:3 image. The same pixels are present in both, but only one has been processed with its resulting degradation.

Don't believe resampling causes degradation? Just take it a few steps further, and try resampling to 100x480 or some other size that is drastically smaller than the original. Of course the degradation at 720x480 will not be nearly as bad as this, but the principal is exactly the same - you can't make it better by reducing the resolution. Even if your resampling system is engineered superbly, there will be some degradation rather than an improvement.

Richard

:) Images! Something to look at!

To wear out my Gecko shot further, this shows the XL2's 720x480 anamorphic frame stretched out to correct aspect ratio:

www.holyzoo.com/content/xl2/images/Gecko.png

If you were to resize it to fit in 720 width, it would look like this:

http://www.holyzoo.com/content/xl2/images/Gecko_720x540.png

Some people may have better eyes than me, but both images look damn good and clear to me. I never thought DV could get to this point. So I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.

I'm out.



p.s. As an aside, now I'm waiting to see an HD camera under $10k that can even better. The Z1/FX1 is not it to me.

I just went through this learning experience having shot my first true 16x9 24p project.

I just recently started using the Mac and have the production suite. In FCP, you need to set your capture pref to NTSC DV with the ALL IMPORTANT anamorphic box CHECKED! Then, make sure your sequence preset is set the same way as your capture preset. You will be working in a nice 16x9 screen. Save the edited sequence to self contained QT movie with the same settings above. Since I shot in regular 3:2 24p, I left the time base at 29.97.

Bring the movie into DVDSP as an asset. Right click(or command-click) on that movie in the asset pane and be sure to check the anamorphic flag in the encoder preference. This will make sure that DVDSP knows that you want the anamorphic flag set in the mpeg2 render. For your menus, you will have to set the checkbox in the inspector pane for 16x9.

The only thing that has to be set for a pixel size other than 720x480 is graphics from other software such as livetype or motion. For these, use a setting of 854x480. Then burn your finished project to DVD.

Now, as stated above, the DVD player SHOULD have a set up menu where you tell it which type of tv you have. When it plays the DVD, you will see a full screen image if you own a 16x9 or a letterboxed 16x9 on a 4:3 screen if that's what you have.

It worked for me! If anything, Ram should be asking how to set up 4:3 framing guides on his 16:9 VF. I do wish Canon would have included those. Otherwise, you can always sit though your footage in the edit doing a pan and scan which you can also tell your project to use in DVDSP. My DVD player also offers the pan and scan option if I set it for a 4:3 display output.

The main thing I wanted to stress after 'doing it wrong' myself is that you need to keep those video files at 720x480 all the way through. If you start trying to change the pixel dimensions to fit a widescreen format, you will wind up with a severe quality hit and time hit cause it trys to reformat all your footage when all you have to do is make sure to check the anamorphic button whereever you find it from capture through finished DVD.

I was very happy with the footage as displayed on a 65" WS RP HDTV.

Have fun...

-gb-

David,

Your reminder to import a project rather than export/import uncompressed files is excellent. And of course in PPro you have unlimited nesting of sequences within a project. I just verified that it works fine to import a 16:9 PRPROJ (and all its associated media files) into a 4:3 project. No problem...I don't know why you're not able to do so, but I'm guessing some buried setting...

I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of that to begin with! I'm sure I must have posted that before I finished my coffee this morning!
-----
Richard,

Yes, we both contributed to a painfully long discussion on picket fences. ;-)

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36373&highlight=resolution

I understand your point about the in-camera downsampling, but then what's the net effect of that along with horizontal pixel shift and 12-bit processing prior to DV compression? In truth, none of us know just how the electronic guts are engineered. The bottom line is the stellar image that's firewired out of the camera, so about the only way to really know for sure would be a carefully done resolution comparison of the 720 widescreen pixels to the 720 narrow screen pixels (...or was that picket fences?!!!!)

If any discernable difference is found, I'm sure it would be slight anyway. Shooting 16:9 and letterboxing is easier in terms of framing shots, better for minimizing quality loss from rendering various effects, and for later re-purposing of edited 16:9 video. Pending any surprising outcomes in a 16:9 vs 4:3 shoot-out or other reasons to shoot 4:3 that none of us has yet considered, I still personally would shoot in 16:9. But then, it'll all work out fine if Ram decides to go with black tape and straight 4:3 all the way, too.

<<<-- Originally posted by Pete Bauer :

If any discernable difference is found, I'm sure it would be slight anyway. Shooting 16:9 and letterboxing is easier in terms of framing shots, better for minimizing quality loss from rendering various effects, and for later re-purposing of edited 16:9 video. Pending any surprising outcomes in a 16:9 vs 4:3 shoot-out or other reasons to shoot 4:3 that none of us has yet considered, I still personally would shoot in 16:9. But then, it'll all work out fine if Ram decides to go with black tape and straight 4:3 all the way, too. -->>>

Hi Pete. First, let me say that I agree with everybody who says the XL2 images are great, and that I'm not in any way trying to put down what this camera can achieve. If someone prefers the workflow of shooting 16:9 and then resizing it for 4:3 output I am sure the results will be OK (in fact I am very sure, because I do this myself).

The point I am trying to make is that I believe the 4:3 mode on the XL2 produces the best image quality, from a technical viewpoint. Even though 16:9 can produce great results, if the end result is a 4:3 video (with or without letterbox bars) then 16:9 can never be as good as shooting 4:3 to begin with. Talking about shooting 16:9 and then using uncompressed for intermediate steps in order to reduce the resampling degradation doesn't make much sense to me when you can easily avoid the resampling simply by shooting 4:3. The generation loss of a good DV codec (like Vegas or Canopus) is very low.

Regarding Rams' other point about rendering, adding black bars to a 4:3 project should give faster renders than resizing a 16:9 video, but I suppose it depends on the NLE. I will give it a try in Vegas and see what the difference is.

Richard

David,

Your reminder to import a project rather than export/import uncompressed files is excellent. And of course in PPro you have unlimited nesting of sequences within a project. I just verified that it works fine to import a 16:9 PRPROJ (and all its associated media files) into a 4:3 project. No problem...I don't know why you're not able to do so, but I'm guessing some buried setting...

Are you saying you're able to import a nested sequence coming from a 16:9 project and have it properly letterboxed in a 4:3 project? Because I sure can't. I can import a 16:9 video file and when the "Scale clips to project dimensions when adding to sequence" option is checked, it will be automatically letterboxed.

But if I drag the nested sequence into the timeline instead of a video file, it does not letterbox it, it just crops the sides and there is no way I'm aware of to get the full 16:9 image back in the 4:3 monitor window.

<<<-- Originally posted by Steev Dinkins : Not to enter into platform battle, but Final Cut Pro can easily nest sequences (drag and drop one edited sequence into another). After Effects is able to do this easily as well. It's hard to believe Premiere doesn't support this.

By nesting a 16:9 anamorphic sequence inside a 4:3 sequence, FCP automatically does the right thing, and doesn't require exporting first. Just make sure to purge renders if you're not working uncompressed, so it's not double compressing DV25 format.

Steev is it possible to shoot 16:9 using the xl2 with final cut pro and output as 4:3 without the letterbox. I am shooting a project that I am still undecided as if I should shoot 16:9 or 4:3 maybe you can help me decide.
It's intented for tv, but I want the film look and I think by shooting 16:9 it will more like film.


Also, if quality and hard drive space are both a concern, you can export an uncompressed-processed sequence straight out to Mpeg-2, without exporting a file first. This way you can apply color smoothing to rid the blocky artifacts in DV25 and get a better quality Mpeg-2 encode.

Again, I would definitely not shoot 4:3 and crop that to widescreen in post, when you have an XL2 with it's gorgeous 16:9 imaging path (with proper framing in your viewfinder - IMPORTANT), from which you can scale to a 4:3 image in post if need be.

If you were really paranoid about this scaling process, do the scaling on an uncompressed export of the edited piece in After Effects with it's superior scaling. -->>>

<<<-- Originally posted by Ed Pierre :Steev is it possible to shoot 16:9 using the xl2 with final cut pro and output as 4:3 without the letterbox. I am shooting a project that I am still undecided as if I should shoot 16:9 or 4:3 maybe you can help me decide. It's intented for tv, but I want the film look and I think by shooting 16:9 it will more like film. -->>>

Well, sure, you could shoot 16:9, then crop off the left and right sides to make it 4:3, but I wouldnt' do that. If you are wanting the final output to fill a 4:3 screen, shoot 4:3 in the camera.

The decision to shoot 4:3 vs 16:9 is a pretty lengthy subject. I'm shooting my creative projects 16:9 now since it just looks nicer to me, even though it ends up letterboxed on most TVs. I think 4:3 would be a smart decision if your target audience is 4:3 broadcast and it's a commercial endeavor. I don't have anything airing on broadcast, so I pretty much go with whatever I want. Also, I think 16:9 looks nicer on the web too. One more argument would be that the XL2 16:9 footage would uprez to HD a lot better, once that becomes mainstream. I am archiving work in uncompressed format for that purpose.

Wow... I have created a monster! Good to see quite a few ppl are participating in this. But now with opinions coming from all directions, I'm confused! I want the "DV God" come and settle things!

To shoot in 16:9 or to shoot in 4:3 and letterbox it... that's the question.... (output being 4:3).

My intial idea was to just shoot in 4:3 but to frame it to 16:9 and then add letterbox in post. I was gonna buy some electric tape from local hardware store. Looks like I have to hold that until this comes to an end. Another reason I like doing this so that I can put my logo on lower right corner of the video.... I like part of the logo to overlay on letterbox area. That sort of give a stylish look. But if I take shooting in 16:9 route, I guess I can't do that... the logo has to be in the video within the safe area.

Main thing for me is minimizing rendering time as much as possible. If I can take 16:9 route and still don't have to do much rendering then I don't mind going this way.

I have 3 4:3 weddings filling up my hard drive.... will finish them soon. After that I'm gonna clear up my hard drive and gonna do some test shoots myslef. Let u guys know with the result.

Tis what discussion threads are all about - hear different views, and make up your own mind.

About putting logo in corner, you could still do that with the nested 16:9 inside 4:3.

For me, I am happy to not have to tape up my viewfinder with electrical tape and other crap anymore.

I finally got around to doing a resolution comparison and posted some frame grabs:

http://www.geosynchrony.com/scratchpad.htm

The short version is that unless I screwed something up, the XL2 bumps right into the theoretical horizontal resolution limit in 16:9.

Looks like it is pretty much a tie for getting letterboxed 4:3 ... shooting 16:9 and importing into a 4:3 project looks pretty much the same as shooting 4:3 and masking (for my fairly crude test anyway).

Cheers,

Hi Pete. It's good to see someone actually carrying out tests for this. Thanks for posting the results.

I have a question - why are the heights of the charts different for the 16:9 and 4:3 frame grabs? I would have expected that the chart size and geometry would remain fixed and only the amount of space at the sides would change. I checked on my XL2, and the visible height does not change when I switch between 16:9 and 4:3 modes.

My wife is quite tolerant too, but anyway I have a separate room for editing that she doesn't come into very much. So if I could get a soft copy of the resolution charts I'd be happy to repeat your tests using a PAL cam. Are these available somewhere for download?


Richard

I probably should have explained more about the images, but it was a beautiful Saturday outside as I sat obsessively trying to get this done -- as quickly as possible!

I did the frame grabs as *.bmp exports directly off the timeline in PPro 1.5.1, so each file was square pixel 720x480. That gives an image aspect ratio of 1.5 regardless of the pixel aspect ratio that was being used on the timeline. The 16:9 gets squished from 1.2 PAR to 1.0, and the 4:3 gets stretched from 0.9 PAR to 1.0.

To see it as in the timeline, the 16:9 picture needs to either be oversampled and saved at about 854x480 square pixels, or viewed with an application like Photoshop CS that can display the image in non-square (1.2 PAR) pixels. Similarly, the 4:3 pictures would appear in correct image aspect ratio if resampled to 640x480, or viewed at 720x480, 0.9 PAR. But, of course, the effective NUMBER of pixels in the images won't change, just how much they are stretched or squeezed.

The rez charts are here (the one I used is near the bottom of the page):
http://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/respat/

If you're willing to go to the bother, I'd welcome a repeat of the experiment. Even though the vertical resolution will be different in PAL, the horizontal direction is still 720px. I'm not at all an expert in these things, so getting a result indicating the camera is putting out right at, or even just a nit better than the theoretical limit of 360 line pairs across leaves me wondering a bit. Is it some electronic wizardry or despite doublechecking my math, did I not do this quite right?

In any case, this may be all but moot before long. As fine a camera as the XL2 may be now, HiDef is nipping at its heels!

Hi Pete. Thanks for the chart files. I'll give it a go soon (before my XL2 is obsolete :) ).

Richard