How do you widescreen your footage in Adobe Premiere 6.0?

I've just gotten Premiere 6.0 (I was using 6.0 LE before) and everytime I try to widescreen my footage (1.85:1) the picture is just squished down. How do I widescreen the footage without this happening? SOMEONE HELP!

 

OK, did you film your movie in your camera's in-built Wide mode?

If so then all you need to do is capture it as a Widescreen file (New Project > DV Widescreen, then capture it)

However if you didn't film it in Wide mode, that presents a problem.

See the image you have is 4:3 and if you put it in widescreen on Premiere it just changes the shapes of the pixels to wide boxes. Thing is that means it squashes your picture vertically so everybody becomes fat and flattened.

The only way around this is to capture it as standard DV (not widescreen) and then crop your footage (ie cut the top and bottom off so you are left with a 16:9 image). To do this find the Crop effect (it's in the Transform folder) and use it to cut off the top and bottom to get a wide-shaped image.
This is also another problem because you will lose part of your shot.

There are two ways you can get widescreen next time, and they depend on how you shoot it:

*Use your camera's Wide mode if it has that, it will give you a wide box instead of the full square-ish frame. Then capture it as Widescreen in Premiere.
OR
*Shoot it in normal mode but cover up the top and bottom of your camera's LCD screen so that when you frame your shots you fit everything you want into the wide box.
You can then Crop it in Premiere so that you don't lose any of the image you filmed.

Hope that helps,

Grand

 

Thanks, I'll try that.

When we filmed the movie, we were using a portable DVD player w/LCD screen as video assist, and it had an ability to zoom into the picture to fit it's widescreen screen, therefore cropping it for us so we knew what it would look like at 1.85:1. Just getting it to look like that in Premiere is a problem.

Thanks again.

 

Hey that's a very good idea for a monitor! I might try that.

 

I have a question. On my camcorder, widescreen (with the original lens) gives a slightly wider image than full-frame, but also records it with the black bars on it.

So....couldn't I film in widescreen mode, then crop the original black bars off in post? Or should I film in full-frame and crop it manually??

 

No clue dude.

However, after widescreening the footage on Premiere (I had to do it shot by shot... it took forever!), now when I try to export the footage to the DV cam to record it it is stretched vertically. How do you get this damned thing to work properly?

 

AWB cropping the black bars off in Premiere will do no good. You want a widescreen image and the way to get it is to lose the top and bottom, hence the existence of the black bars.

When you export it to camera often it loses the bars and then is expanded vertically. Which is a pain.

What I have done to solve this is take my footage (which I shot in wide mode), put it in a non-widescreen project, and then use the Transform effect to squash it vertically (make Scale Height = about 74). Then I exported this footage to DV camera.
That way it records the bars as part of the image.

shwanzi, I don't understand why it stretches your footage even after you've cut off the top and bottom. You should be doing it in a non-widescreen project (DV PAL / NTSC) and then it should really keep the bars as part of the picture.

 

It stretches the picture because you did not maintain the pixel aspect ratio.

You don't have to use the transform effect. All you have to do is right click the footage, got to: Advanced Options --> Pixel Aspect Ratio... and change it to widescreen. The you right click the footage again and go to: Video Options --> Maintain Aspect Ratio

This will give you the widescreen view with the black bars above/below the picture so when you export to tape, you won't get the picture stretched vertically.

 

if it is truely captured in 16x9 aspec you can just right-click on the clip go to Video
then click Maintain Aspect Ratio.

**Badda Bing Badda Bomb.**

~Hope this helped

P.S. you will have to do that to every clip on the timeline ofcourse.

[edit]
woops, Festivis7 already beat me to it
[/edit]

 

There is a difference between 16:9 and 4:3 in both frame size and pixel aspect ratio.

The bottom line is this:

4:3 DV NTSC, or 1.33:1, is 720x480 pixels with a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9... slightly nonsquare pixels.

16:9 DV NTSC is actually 1.77:1, not 1.85:1 (AMPAS format), as is often mistaken, and definitely not 2.35:1 (Cinemascope). Normally, all of these formats, including 16:9, are achieved by either anamorphic optics, or an anamorphic CMOS CCD... in DV terms, the frame resolution doesn't change, it stays 720x480, but the pixel size changes... whereas most sub-$30,000 cameras do not have a native 16:9 mode, but a simulated mode in which the section of the CCD that captures the image is proportionately smaller and yet the image is electronically rescaled to 720x480 with a 1.2 pixel aspect... but to me the decrease in image resolution is irrelevant if you ultimately are going to output the video back to a standard television, instead of a widescreen TV, anyway.

Why? Well, there's two parts to this answer.

1. Because once you're done editing in 16:9 in Premiere... and you want to output back to a 4:3 standard TV... either you have to rescale the image back to its relative size in the 4:3 DVD frame... limiting the resolution of the letterboxed video to the proportional pixel count it occupied during capture on your non-native 16:9 mode... or you have to have DVD Studio Pro or Sonic DVDit! Professional Edition, to encode true anamorphic widescreen so both a 16:9 and 4:3 TVs know what to do to the video to size is properly... only with anamorphic encoding will the DVD player tell the TV whether to stretch the image (if it's a wide TV) or to squeeze and letterbox the image (if it's a standard TV). Other than these two softwares, there are no others I know of that can properly encode a 16:9 anamorphic video.

2. Hypothetical question: Won't my widescreen video look distorted if I rescale it?

Not if you do it right. Remember two things... The frame aspect ratio: 1.77:1, and the pixel apect ratio: 1.2.

If you use a widescreen session to edit your 16:9 video, then export it back to DV/DVCPro compression using the same settings as your original capture settings (so there is no generation loss when you go to the next step in digital remastering process)... then import the entire finished video into a 4:3 session... yes, a 4:3 session.

Now, taking the frame and pixel aspect ratio into account, a 16:9 video needs to be vertically scaled down exactly 75 percent in a 4:3 session for it to match 1.77:1 frame aspect ratio within a 4:3 screen, given the change in pixel aspect ratio from 1.2 to 0.9. So, you do a transform over the entire video with a vertical scale of 75 percent, and do not change the position of the video... it will stay centered and automatically matte out the portions outside the scaled video with black bars. The rendering will take forever, but it's worth it... more computer intensive, but less manual labor-intensive than importing every clip into 4:3 and rescaling all clips individually. I did some preliminary tests and Premiere did a pretty damn fine job of rescaling it without generation loss (as long as I maintained my capture settings all the way to the end of Project #2).

If I can find a way to show these tests with reasonable quality on the web, I will post side by side comparisons some time.

Again, the reason you can maintain quality with an electronic 16:9 rescaled to an electronic letterboxed 4:3 in Premiere is because the vertical resolution is being rescaled to the same percentage of the 4:3 screen as the original image occupied on the CCD... 75 percent. It is essentially the equivalent of shooting 4:3 and cropping 25 percent of the image, but this allows you to take advantage of the 16:9 viewfinder in your MiniDV cam and the 16:9 edit mode in Premiere.

Of course it's always better to shoot things natively... but who here has $30,000-80,000 to blow? ... more importantly, how

 

Thanks for the help people. Just to repay y'all I'll have your screen names in the film's end credits! How's them apples?!?

 

Thing with just 'Maintain Aspect Ratio' I have found is that when you transfer it from DV to VHS it loses the bars and becomes stretched.

Now that I think about it that's an entirely different problem.

Do you guys know why this is?