Rendering HD Footage Standard

[Peter Ferriero]

Trying to render out HD Footage in standard..when I do it 4:3 it puts black bars..will it show on tv? Whats the best way to do it?

[Bryan Daugherty]

Peter,
If I am understanding your query, you are attempting to take HD source material and output to SD 4:3. Since HD is native to a 16:9 aspect you have two options to get to 4:3 without distortion: letterboxing or zoom/cropping.

When you letterbox, black bars are added to the top and bottom of the screen in a 4:3 project to maintain the original framing and aspect ratio of the source footage. When played back on a 4:3 TV the bars will show. If played back on a 16:9 TV, the footage will have letterbox bars all the way around (presuming the TV/player is set to letterbox and not stretch or zoom.)

If you choose to zoom/crop to achieve your 4:3 SD. You will need to pan your view frame to highlight the footage you want the client to see (using the Event pan/crop interface) and will crop away any footage not inside the frame box. That is why this method is often called pan and scan (actually referring to when old footage had to be panned and scanned for TV/VHS/etc.)

In my experience, I find it best to render out progressive files since the HD footage and SD footage have different field orders and downsampling can result in bad interlace artifacts.

It is my preference and SOP to deliver all projects in 16:9. If this is played on a properly set-up 4:3 TV it will display as letterboxed 16:9 footage. If played on a properly set-up widescreen TV, it will playback 16:9 edge to edge with little to no letterboxing.

Does this help? If you have more questions can you provide more information about your source file specs, project settings, and how you hope to deliver the final product? Thanks, and good luck with your project.