Adobe Premiere - 16:9 Conversion ???

Hello Fanfilm community! It's been a very long time since I last posted, here. I've basically been busy just DOING stuff, instead of chatting about doing stuff.
Now, I hope the following question is really as stupid and simple as it sounds - because my previous research allows me to assume that it's actually a rather complex matter.

How do I crop & render only the 16:9 area of a 4:3 project in Adobe Premiere (CS3) ???

Simply editing the 4:3 footage in a 16:9 project won't work, because I'm dealing with 4:3 footage shot on a self-made mini-35 adapter whose vignetting effect only affects the UPPER part of the frame. This means I can only use the bottom of the frame. Hence, I have to vertically move each clip upward by about 156 pixels (speaking of a 720 x 576 PAL resolution).
Also, I want to add my own sort of viewing cache, by adding two black bars at the top and bottom of the 16:9 field, making it a sort of "16:7" viewing experience. Until today I've been using Ulead Media Studio Pro which allowed me to do the following:

Open a 4:3 project. Import 4:3 clips, move them up a bit to use only the lower part of the frame. Adding my black bars. Now, I'd either render a 4:3 version of the project which would include the black bars. OR: I would go to the rendering options, enter a resolution of "720 x 405 pixels" and enter the "crop menu" where I could tell the program to cut off 85 pixels at the top and 85 pixels at the bottom. The result would be a 720 x 405 pixels 16:9 Video with exactly as much black bars as I wished for.

A week ago some wise person thankfully told me that the previously described process of rendering a 720 x 405 pixels leads to a LOSS OF RESOLUTION hence SHARPNESS. And that it would be a better idea to do the following:

Edit my stuff in a 4:3 project. Maybe even add my absurd 16:7 black bars. THEN, I should add some sort of plugin like an adjustment layer which vertically stretches EVERYTHING until the actors get "long faces". Now I would have a pseudo-16:9 image - only that it's stretched to 720x576 pixels in order to prevent from a loss of resolution and sharpness. Later, in my DVD authoring program I could just import this 4:3 (720x576 pixels) video, hit the "16:9" button and this would automatically tell my DVD-Player to stretch-down the 4:3 image back into it's natural 16:9 cage for the actors to look normal, again.

To be honest, I have no idea what's the difference between ill-looking 720x576 pixels that look like they want to be 16:9 and native 720x405 pixels which ARE REALLY 16:9. Can you tell me? I don't believe there's any viewable difference in the "sharpness" of these two images, since the missing pixels are "stretched away" anyway.


ANYHOW:

1.) Can Adobe Premiere render 720x405 pixels RAW? Without any compression? Lossless? If yes, HOW?

2.) If not - can Adobe Premiere add an adjustment layer to a 4:3 project (720x576) which stretches ALL VIDEO TRACKS (including my absurd 16:7 bars)? to a pseudo-16:9 aspect ratio?

3.) If neither of these -- is opening a 16:9 project (720x576) from the very beginning the best idea to handle the situation? Because I have tried this already and it forces me to scale the 4:3 footage up to a resolution that horizontially fills the 16:9 screen. In my understanding this equals a digital zoom-in. And at this point I am afraid that I'm losing much more resolution than I would by my 720x405 rendering solution.

Please, if somebody knows best - just tell me. I want to start editing! Thank you very much!

 

There's a "wide" format in NTSC, and I see there's a similar one for PAL where the IMAGE aspect ratio is 4:3 (720x576), but the PIXEL aspect ratio is 1.42. The file basically says, I'm 720 pixels wide, but my pixels want to be stretched out onto your wide-screen. That's the long-face look your talking about: the image looks squeezed unless the player understands the pixel aspect.

Cropping to 720x405 might cause you to lose sharpness, but that's a complicated situation. You're giving away those cropped-off pixels, but the ones you didn't crop should be as good as ever. Moving the frame up (to hide your vignette) might cause a problem if you move it in fractions of pixels (forcing the software to blend several lines), or if you've not been careful with the interlacing (you might want to always move your image an even-number of lines upward).

It sounds to me like you should render ordinary 720x576 with a 16:7 letterbox matte.

If you're trying to up-sample for widescreen, that's a separate issue. For one thing you'll have to zoom/scale the 405 lines up to 576, and then change the pixel aspect from 1.07 to 1.422. I don't think Pemiere allows you to do that. You might be able render the 720x576 masked with your black-box, then import that file back into a widescreen project, and scale it to fit. AE makes this sort of stuff relatively easier.

 

Render your edited but uncropped project uncompressed. Re-import into Premiere, AE, whatever. Make the size sequence or comp you want to be your final. Drag in your file, scale up, and enjoy!

 

I agree with Andy about that first phase: edit using Premiere in standard PAL...

As for moving the frame up to hide the vignette, that's the first place I'd worry about losing sharpness.
First of all, if you "deinterlace" the footage you'll throw away half the lines of your resolution and lose sharpness. However, deinterlaced footage can be moved up or down in the frame without trouble, since the line-blending (which cuts your sharpness) was already done by the de-interlace filter.
If you do not deinterlace (which I recommend as my personal preference, but beware as I continue to explain...) then your 25 fps footage is 'really' 50 images per second, it's just that each frame is two images (the upper and lower "fields") shuffled together. TVs display (and cameras record) the odd-numbered lines first, and then the even-numbered ones 1/50th of a second later. So if you move your image up or down, Premeire will try to mix the two interlaced fields (which were photgraphed at slightly different times) making any fast movements in the shot look smudged.

I usually choose to get the best of both worlds (and save as much image sharpness as possible) by using AE to spread the two fields apart into a 50 fps progressive format, doing effects and whatnot, and then rendering back out to regular interlaced 25fps PAL. You can edit and move the frames in Premiere (but not render from there), and then import the Premiere-project file into AE to perform the deinterlace-prerender-reinterlace-render sequence all at once. AE will also do a nicer job of scaling-up 405 to 576; it uses a photoshop-like bi-cubic filter, which Premiere doesn't have iirc.

Finally, Ripley, I'll offer to process a sample of your footage my way so you can see the difference it makes. My e-mail is in my user profile.