Creating your own aspect ratio?

[Patrick]

Yet another NLE question! I’m assuming that with many of the better NLE programs, you can alter the aspect ratio by adding black borders on the top and bottom or sides etc. However, I’m wondering with any of these programs, can you custom design your own aspect ratio?

Ive got some DV footage which unfortunately recorded a little bit more information from the sides of the frame that could not bee seen in the LCD monitor when I was composing the shot. As a result, there is this very distracting green thing (possibly part of a watering can) that crept into the far left side of the frame. I’m guessing that some NLE programs would allow you to zoom into the frame but this would result in a loss of quality and also chop off the top and bottom of the frame. (I want the height to remain the same.) Is there any such software out there that lets you add vertical black borders on the left and right sides of the frame and also gives you precise control over varying the thickness of those borders?

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

You can usually add black borders with "crop", or something similar.

[Scotness]

Hi Patrick - you can normally crop 1 to 2 % off with out any noticeable loss in quality. Virtualdub has a good resize filter in it - in the filters collection. I think the DV spec requires that it remain as 720x576 - so you will have to add bars in as you say - virtual dub can letterbox automatically. Other codecs have other restrictions - usually things like the width and height being multiples of 4.

Scot

[Scotness]

BTW the region to the side that you can't see is called overscan - it's a right pain in the backside in my opinion. on higher end cameras you can turn the overscan off - so that everything you film is shown in the viewfinder.

On the plus side not all of the overscan area is displayed on tv screens. I think overscan exists because tv's all display varying amounts of the one picture.

I've been caught out before too.
What NLE are you using? Most of them have crop functions built in - just try cropping it out - if you don't have to lose more than a few percent the result should be fine.

Check these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan
http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/ ... m#overscan

Scot

[Freya]

This is really easy to do in Sony Vegas!

Not only are there presets for common aspect ratios but there is a really very easy to use interface for cropping the video in any way you might so desire, and the whole process works incredibly fast.

Worth checking out.

love

Freya

[Davideo]

In Final Cut Pro, use the Widescreen filter. You can adjust the size to where you want it to be. After creating your letterbox, you can move your film image up/down to preserve what's important.

[Patrick]

Thanks all! I'd like to have as go at Virtual Dub oneday but it seems my computer has problems with Winzip files.

Ulead Video Studio, which I do have, seems to have some soft of crop feature. Though it looks like it's preset to crop a huge chunk out of a shot - in other words a useless feature.

Are there free trial periods available with Sony Vegas or Final Cut Pro? The only annoying thing I find with free software trials is that after the trial period ends, it seems that the software still remiains on your computer, taking up valuable space. That's what happened when I downloaded a trial of the latest version of Adobe Photoshop. After the trial ended, Ive tried to remove it with Control Panel but to no avail.

[granfer]

Hope this is not a "teach grandma to suck eggs" answer, but people tend to overlook the fact that if there is not a removal tool for a program in Control Panel-Add or Remove, very often thereis one to be found in the StartMenu- submenu for the program (e.g. Name, Manual, Web Page, Uninstall)