I have an HC1 for the day and need to output letterboxed 4:3 from its 16x9 HDV signal.

It is outputting to my SD monitor but its not letterboxing and everybody has an egghead.

I downloaded the manual but its not very clear how to accomplish this.

I also don't have any of the cables but the DV one.


can the HC-1 output letterboxed 4:3 of the downconverted hdv signal over DV?

thanks!


EDIT:

well darn, it looks like the HC1 does not do letterbox of the downconverted signal, only
the A1 does.

Or am I wrong?

If its like my FX1 you have to set TV type to 4x3. The DV signal will always contain the 16x9 data though so it depends on your converter of the DV signal how its is viewed on a TV.

Ron Evans

thats just it, I'm not seeing a 4:3 option in any of the menus.

thats just it, I'm not seeing a 4:3 option in any of the menus.

look again, if you have an HC1 there is definitely that option:

standard set- > tv type -> 4:3 / 16:9

and i found it affects both the analogue output as well as the DV down-convert output.

if you are capturing from DV I strongly recommend you use 16:9 though! this way you are going to get much better quality results. Any good NLE should be able to handle 16:9 DV files natively. and it still leaves you the option for letterboxing at a later stage.

It is on page 59 of the manual that you can download from the Sony site. You must by in Play/edit, look in the standard set menu, iLink HDV/DV conversion set On and set TV type to 4x3 should give you a letter box output. You are right that the Pro version A1 I think gives the option of a 4x3 center cut, this is not letterbox but a full 4x3 image cut from the center of the 16x9 image.

Ron

the job is done now, i was just making a simple dvd for somebody, so I played it out of firewire as 16x9 then encoded it on the fly via panasonic dvd-ram recorder, ripped the mpeg and ac3 files, flagged the mpeg as 16x9 then authored the dvd as anamorphic.

looks great and was apparently the best way to go for picture quality. :)