16:9-->letterboxed 4:3.....
 

Hi all.

Has anyone shot 16:9 with the PDX10, edited it on FCE, and authored, "flagged", and burnt it with idvd, for viewing as letterboxed on 4:3 TVs?
I'm new to these softwares, have never burnt a dvd, and am about to go crack open all of the appropriate owner's manuals, but I wanted to try for fast and easy answers too. I did a search here, and got a general gist, but I also wanted to hear from others that might be using the same combination of post tools. I'll be shooting an event tomorrow night for someone, and don't want to take a chance that my set up disallows somehow for this
16:9-->letteboxed4:3 process.
Thanks.
Regards,
Shawn

Since no-one answered I'll answer it in a generic way. The flag
must be set while encoding the mpeg and when authoring the
DVD. So you should check your applications for compliance with
this. Usually only the higher end application support 16:9. If
you don't have such an applications you can still letterbox the
video BEFORE it goes to the MPEG encoder and then on to the
authoring stage. Ofcourse you will loose resolution in that case.

Otherwise you can shoot in 4:3 and add letterboxing on top of
that or leave it as is.

Re: 16:9-->letterboxed 4:3.....
 

I can't really answer the iDVD part since I haven't used it. I'm going to assume that FCE behaves like FCP, and letterboxing is extremely simple. Assuming that you shot in 16:9, import the footage into FCP with the anamorphic 16:9 option checked. Or if you neglect to do this, change an existing clip's properties to anamorphic 16:9. Now just create a new 4:3 sequence and drop your 16:9 clip into it. Voila... you get letterboxed 16:9 in a 4:3 frame.

Now I would assume nothing special needs to be done on iDVD since it seems like it would default to 4:3 anyway, wouldn't it?