PD150 Letterbox Bars
 

I was just wondering, does the PD150 has an option to display bars or guidelines on the lcd screen or viewfinder to let you know what will be in picture after letterboxing?

How do you know if everything is in shot for a letterbox on the PD-150 when shooting?

Actually it doesn't shoot in "letterbox" mode. If you choose the widescreen setting it will crop the image, then stretch it anamorphically to display on widescreen monitors. If you view this footage on a regular 4:3 monitor it will be "squashed". The LCD and viewfinder however will show it in the correct aspect ratio.

If you want to letterbox your footage there are two approaches. First, you could crop it in post using your NLE. Second, you could download a matte, copy it to a memory stick, and use the memory mix function to superimpose while you shoot. This would be permanently recorded on tape however and could not be removed later. For more info on this see http://www.streamovie.com/vx2000.htm

Thankyou very much for that Boyd, I spoke to someone recently who had been using a PD150 and they seemed to think that there was a way to display bars on the LCD screen to show where the footage would cut off iff they were to letterbox, ie: just dump black bars across top and bottom, similar to the display on the XL1s.

Do you know if this is true?

I don't think so. Maybe they were looking at the display in widescreen mode, which appears letterboxed, but is actually recorded as anamorphic.

I strongly recommend that the letterboxing be done in post. This is because we get to chose the framing in the quiet contemplation of our edit suite instead of during the event.

Sometimes I find the footage to be better if I move the bars around (and also the footage so it remains center-screen)