Is Cheap Widescreen Necessary?

Great! Thanks for all your help, everyone.

<"Luminara's Saber" begins headlong into post production again.>

 

Leigh-

I don't know if you figured out how to zoom the clip or not, so here's the steps. Click on the clip you want to zoom in on and select CLIP-VIDEO OPTIONS-Motion. The first thing I do is pause the playback, so hit the pause button in between the 2 windows at the top. Now, in the window on the right, select your starting frame and drag it into the exact middle of the visible area box. Check the window on the left to make sure it is centered. Then down at the bottom, there is a field for Delay percentage that should currently say 0%. Change that to 100%. This will force the motion to remain on the first frame and never advance to the end frame. Just above that is the Zoom percentage field and it should say 100% currently. Change that to 103 or something close to that until your distortion is pushed out of frame. That's it! Hit OK and preview in the timeline to make sure it works for you.

Good luck-

Jeremy

 

More points about the "films shot fullscreen" tangent:

Cameron (among others) shoots on "Super 35". That format uses the entire 35mm frame to record the image--not reserving a few mm on the left for an optical sound track like conventional 35mm cameras do. That means a bigger image, and thus better resolution.

He then crops each shot to the desired theatrical aspect ratio, but still has the extra image area to play with when transferring for home video. (Effects shots are usually not composited that way, though, so those still have to be panned-and-scanned for home video.)

What some purists might call "true" widescreen is anamorphic; a spherical lens distorts the image so that it is recorded squished at the sides. If you look at an anamorphic 35mm frame, people look unnatrually tall and skinny. When projected, though, another anamporhic lens distorts it back to its proper ratio and the "squishiness" goes away. This means nothing is cropped and thus the entire (conventional) 35mm frame is utilized.

Only recently has this option been available in electronic form to DV users, in the Canon XL1 and higher, professional-grade units.