I shot some footage in 4:3 that is now sitting on my hard drive. Now I want to add black bars in Premiere 6.5 to simulate 1.85. How EXACTLY do I this?

Thanks

Seth Peterson

Why don't you just output it but cropped to the desired aspect? You can do this in the Export Movie -> Special Settings window.

If you just want to simulate this in the way that you indicated you can draw an object in Premiere. Go into the Title Window (the page icon) in the Project Window (the one with all your project resource files). Click on that and it will bring up a drawing space. Draw a filled black box the dimensions of your black bar. You can go into the Title WIndow options and make sure that the space is the same dimensions as your project.

In After Effects adding black bars is easy. You create two solids of the colour black and overlay them on top of the video track.

Okay I just tried my method just now and it works like this.

Create the two bar graphics as I said in the Title creator which is reached by clicking on the 'page icon' at the bottom of the Project window. Choose "Title" in the dropdown menu. Then in the drawing window that comes up make two black solid rectangles to simulate the black bars you want. Close the window and you will be prompted to save it as a .ppt. Do this. Now it will show up in your Project resources.

Drag this onto a Video track above your actual video. Click on it. Choose the Transparency set up in Effects Controls. Choose White Alpha Matte. You will be able to preview this by clicking on the page curl icon in the same window. If this is right, press OK.

Now when you export a test you will see the black bars show up.

If you want to add black bars, do the following. Create a picture
in a paint program at the size of 720x480 (yes, that is the correct
resolution. I'm going to give you the pixel size already correct
for the pixel aspects so you do NOT need to use another
resolution in your paint program) make sure the background
color of this pictures is WHITE (255,255,255).

Your black color should be either 0,0,0 or 15,15,15 if you want
to stay within legal TV broadcast range.

For 1.85 picture your black bars should be 65 pixels high (leaving
a white space of 350 pixels) and for 16:9 your bars should be 58
pixels high (white space in the middle is then 364 pixels high).

Save the picture in an uncompressed format like BMP or TIFF and
load it in Premiere. Add your footage to Video 1A track and your
just created matte to Video 2 track. Make sure it is exactly as
long as your video track below it (simply change the out point).
Right-click on your mask in Video 2 track and select Video Options
and then Transparency. Select the Difference Matte and hit OK.

Now you will only see this effect when you render it out or when
you drag your timeline cursor with the mouse WHILE HOLDING
DOWN the ALT key!!

Good luck!

Why 720 x 480 pixels? Does a black bar pic of 720 x 576 size (PAL) - standard on Premiere not work? so u have to make it 720 x 480????

I thought you were from NTSC country, not PAL. For PAL ofcourse
it must be 720x576. Your bars should be 81 pixels high for 1.85
PAL. 16:9 has 72 pixel high bars for PAL leaving a white space of
432 pixels. 1.85 leaves a white space of 414 pixels.