Converting 16:9 animation to wide screen

[Michael Chen]

Hi,

Need some advice on converting 16:9 animated footage to 2.39:1.

We have an opening animated sequence done on 16:9 and need to fit them on a 2.39:1 ratio so that it'll be same as the movie footage.

Any advice on getting this done?

And by the way, what ratio do most blockbuster movies nowadays like pirates of the carribean and spiderman use?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

[Emre Safak]

The two common ratios are 1.85:1 (Academy Flat) and 2.39:1 (Anamorphic) Are you sure you need the latter, because the former is more common? Regardless, what you need to do is to tell your encoder to crop, not resize, the clip to a particular resolution that has the desired aspect ratio. For example, if you work with SD NTSC, your pixel aspect ratio is 40:33. Thus to get a 2.39:1 aspect ratio you would need to crop your clip down from 480 pixels in height to 364 (a nice multiple of four, for easier encoding). or each shot you must decide which part of the frame to keep. Your encoding application might even have a preset for this. I do not know what you use, so I can not be of further help.

[Michael Chen]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. I am currently using Adobe after effects and Premier pro 2.0.

But I need to output the footage to 2k resolution for film transfer and not SD.

I can't seem to find the aspect ratio option for this purpose in the adobe program, any ideas?

[Emre Safak]

I have never output to film before, so I can only be of limited help. Are you creating a series of still frames? This page mentions a resolution of 2048 x 1107 for 1.85:1 (which means the pixel aspect ratio is 1:1) and 1828 x 1556 for 2:35.1 because anamorphic images are compressed 2:1 horizontally. When it is uncompressed you get 2x1828 x 1556 or 3656 x 1556.

Crop with a rectangular mask tool (Q).

[Michael Chen]

Thanks for the information.

Will try them out and see how it goes.