anamorphic widescreen footage problem
 

I have footage shot with a VX2000 (a 4:3 camera) using a Century Optics widescreen 16:9 anamorphic adapter in which the adapter was screwed onto the front of the camera at an angle that is 90 degrees wrong, so that the resulting footage is squeezed vertically instead of horizontally.

Is there anyway to correct this footage so that it will look OK in a 16:9 widescreen project?

I'm using Premiere 6.0, but I have access to FCP and Premiere Pro if necessary. Thanks.

Hmmm. This sounds like a pretty difficult problem. I can imagine using a custom aspect ratio project to recover the picture (keep it from looking squashed), but it will be roughly square instead of the 1.78 aspect ration that you need for 16:9. You would have to pillar-box the material to use it in a 16:9 project. Perhaps someone else has a more creative solution.

Well, first off just to make sure, so everything looks fat and stubby with the unaltered footage, right? Just making sure that the squeeze was from top to bottom and not from the sides. Assuming it is, Ralph is right. The best you can hope for now is to normalize the footage back to 4:3 by stretching it up and down. I would do this in After Effects, and I'm not sure what the options would be in Premiere 6, if you can even set a custom size that would do it for you. In After Effects, the solution would be just to import the footage in to a 4:3 720x480 comp (sometimes is 486) and then scale the footage in top to bottom to make it fit. If you can duplicate this in Premiere, and solve your problem, you can, as Ralph suggests, use letter boxing to make it work in a 16x9 format. A trick I used when letter boxing footage that was shot 4:3 was to move the footage down using the motion settings (the start and end positions are the same, so the footage doesn't actually move) and then lay the cropping bars over top. This way I didn't cut off the tops of peoples heads. I assed the position of the video clip on a clip by clip basis. Some shots needed to be moved down a lot, some not at all. Hope this helps.

Thanks guys ... I haven't used after effects before, this may be the time to learn ;)

Dave,

You could also just blow up the footage and using the center. You'd take a resolution hit, but at least you'd avoid pillarboxing. You should be able to use the Motion pallette to do a horizontal stretch until it looks right.

Josh

You could go the "perspective" + "transform" route in Premiere 6 but rendering may give you a reduced resolution. I don't think you have options for processing at a higher quality in P6 that you have in After Effects.

In Premiere Pro, I think you select the "distort" function in the effects menu. Premiere Pro seems to lose less resolution when rendering these effects than Premiere 6.

Either displays to you, a similar style of vertical and horizontal percentage choices of pecentage numbers in little boxes which you change by typing in new numbers or using an arrow feature to make them wind down or up in value.

In Premiere 6 or Premier Pro you may find you have to highlight each clip individually on the timeline to apply this effect. There may be a way of applying a common effect across all clips but have not yet learned it.

I imagine that height would have to be reset to 200% or the width to be reset to 50%.

I am not competent in working these editors so don't take to much notice if my comments.

Post a screen grab or a short 3 sec file for someone to fool with.

Thanks for the ideas, guys.

so here are two frame grabs from Premiere 6.0. The first is a jpeg exported from the timeline in a 16:9 project ... the second is exported from the timeline in a 4:3 project.

Notice that putting the footage into a 4:3 project has already helped in that the image is stretched a little vertically, so that the people look more normal, though still a tad squashed. (The bride was slim in real life).

I then tried creating custom projects with aspect ratios of 720x570 (horizontal increased by 1.18) and 856x678 (horizontal and vertical increased again by 1.18), with the thought that I'd then export this footage and then import it into my master 856x480 (16x9) project, but my codec wouldn't allow me to export it (I'm using Canopus DVStorm).

So I went back to importing the original footage into my 16:9 project, I then selected "maintain aspect ratio" and the footage is pillar-boxed, but at least the people appear relatively normal in proportions ... so I may just go with this solution, since zooming in or stretching will reduce the sharpness of the picture (at least, in Premiere, it would, I haven't tried AE).

What do you think?