How to post a widescreen video on the web without showing widescreen bars?
 

Hey guys,

I just completed a music video today and I'm ready to put it up on the internet for all to see. I'd like to have the video "cropped" I guess to where you can only see the video, and not the widescreen bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Suggestions?

How you do this depends on whether or not your video is anamorphic 16:9, or 3:4 to which you added black bars. If it is anamorphic 16:9, you can render out to Web video using a size like 480x288, which would give you a 16:9 image (with no black bars); the 480x288 size would be good for 300kbps to 500kbps+ streaming video. If you have a 3:4 video masked with the black bars, however, you are going to have to crop it to remove the bars, either in your video editor or the encoder, if the encoder offers such a function.

If you own QuickTime Pro ($30) you can use a mask to set the size/aspect ratio of the movie clip. I have done this in the past making a 4:3 clip letterboxed. QT player will size the window to the size of the mask thereby removing any black bars.

Colin

Just an update to my original post. I believe my 480x288 size is incorrect. The right size is 480x270.

For a convenient reference, here are three different sizes that can be used for streaming 16:9 wide screen video.

640x360
480x270
320x180

If you are embedding the video in a Web page, you also need to add in the height of the video plugin's playback control bar when specifying the size of the video in the plugin's code. For the QuickTime plugin add 16 pixels to the height (i.e., the large 640x360 video would then be 640x376). For the Windows Media playback control bar add 45 pixels. I’m not sure if any pixels need to be added when embedding RealMedia files or not. I do know the height of the RealMedia playback control varies with the size of the video.