HELP! Need to convert 4:3 source to anamorphic widescreen

[sledgeweb]

I've been on several forums, and nobody has been able to help me with this. You guys are my last hope...

I'm workin on an independent film. It was shot in DV, in 4:3, but composed for widescreen. That means, I masked the top and bottom of the LCD on the cameras off and composed the shots for a widescreen, in which the tops and bottoms would be cropped.

So, I have all my video imported into Premiere Pro, where I've been editing it in a standard NTSC 720x480 project. Up to this point, I've simply been adding a mask on top of the video to put black bars at the top and bottom. This is rendered out as a 4:3 video and put to DVD via Encore, and, on a 4:3 set, it looks correct.

However, I recently purchased a 16:9 widescreen TV, and I would like to create an anamorphic dvd that plays fullscreen on the widescreen set, and automatically letterboxes itself on a 4:3 set.

Now, it is my understanding that anamorphic is still 720x480, but that it has a different pixel aspect ratio, 1.2 as opposed to 0.9. I've been told that what I need to do, is basically crop the video top and bottom, to something like 720x360, and then to stretch it back to 720x480. However, I'm not sure if the 360 is right, and I'm not sure how to do this in premiere. I can't seem to crop the composition size itself, just the video clips within the composition. However, it also seems that I could just stretch the clips past the borders of the composition, and essentially crop them that way. But, I don't really know how much to stretch them, etc.

I'm also not sure what to do from there to get it on a DVD as anamorphic widescreen. Normally, what I do, is render out as uncompressed AVI, and then drop that into Encore.

Any help?

Thanks,
Sledge

[scharfis_brain]

the vertical (or horizontal) streching ratio of 4:3 to 16:9 is 1.3333333333

this means: 480 / 1.3333333= 360


but: Do not resize your video to anamorphic. it is just a waste of space.
also, if the video is interlaced, resizing may destroy the video.

resizing to anamorphic might only be an idea, if you try to upsize with some advanced methods like sharpresize, iiP or (my favorite) limitedsharpen.also you need progressive video for this.

[sledgeweb]

Well, let's just say I want to try it and see how it looks, if for nothing else than to experiment and figure this out.

So, how do you crop to 360 in premiere?

This is what I just tried: I creatd a mask that has bars on top and bottom, making the viewable area 360. I then stretched the image until the black bars were off the "canvas". So now that 360 area is stretched to 480, in a 720x480 project. Will this work? If so, how do I export it now? There isn't a preset in the Adobe Media Encoder MPEG-2 DVD selection for ANAMORPHIC. They are all either 4:3 or 16:9. I don't know how I need to export it to flag it as anamorphic, and, I'm not sure if I need to do CBR, 1 VBR Pass, 2 VBR Pass, etc.

[Pato]

The 16:9 option will assume input is anamorphic.

[scharfis_brain]

I am an Adobe-N00b.

so I only can give you the hint, exporting the video normally and later crop & upsize it using VDub