16:9 for 4:3 TV Broadcast.
 

I have been seeing commercials where it has been shot in 16:9 and broadcast in 4:3 letterbox, in the black areas there is text.

I would like to do this in Premiere; do I import the 16:9 clips into a 4:3 project?
Or is there a better way?

Thank you.
Bill

I don't know if I'm doing it right, but I shoot and edit in widescreen, then export my finished movie as a 1.2 widescreen file. I import that exported file into a 4:3 project, and scale it down until it fits.

There has to be an easier way to do it, but this isn't that bad.

Good luck.

Shrinking footage and showing black borders
 

Why not lay down black video as the bottom layer, then use Motion/Scale to shrink your footage in the layer above. You are then free to add titles or photoshop layers to get the text in the black areas. Laying black underneath is the way to scale stills that might not cover the entire frame.

If you're going to edit 16:9 for a final product in 4:3, then yes, export the final footage in 16:9 back into a 4:3 project and then re-export it as a final file, you'll have LB bars added by Premier.

I do something when I export for DVD for my customers where I edit and export the project in 16:9 then when I do the MPG conversion in TMPGenc, then I start a Sony DVD Archietect project and set the 16:9 bit on the DVD so that it forces the LB bit on the customers player and they see 4:3 with LB or full 16:9, works flawlessly as long as they know to setup their DVD player correctly.

ML

Thank you for the help!

Bill