I have some 16:9 footage that I would like to crop to 2.35:1.

I've discovered this is quite complex because of underscan and various pixel aspect ratios etc, but this is what I've done so far.

I asked my friend to make a PNG canvas at 800 pixels width with the canvas height at 800/1.78 of that (about 449 pixels). This gave the 16:9 canvas. I asked him to make it green value 255 (for keying out later) and to add black bars at the top and bottom that fill 12.5% of the frame each.

When I put this over my video at pixel aspect ratio of 1.00 (Square), the black bars seem too shallow. So I changed it to 1.09 (PAL DV, not Widescreen) to see if this would fix it. It made the bars thicker, but I don't know where they are thick enough for the overscan frame, plus, there is space at the top and bottom where the bars end vertically in the underscan frame.

http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g111/Bodrochowski/howcrop.png

That is what it looks like.

Does anybody know where I can get a PNG mask, or the exact specifications for making one, so that the bars do make a true 2.35:1 frame in the OVERSCAN frame?

Thanks

Before you drive yourself batty with aspect ratios (which is easy to do), check to see if your NLE has a built-in cropping tool. Odds are it does!

Does it even need to be totally exact? If it's just about the "look" of 2.35, then eyeball it. There's a lot of variation in the actual aspect ratio used when transferring Hollywood anamorphic movies to DVD... I'd say if Hollywood doesn't worry that much about getting it perfect, maybe it's not such a huge deal. :)

That's true. I've heard of new aspect ratios being invented all the time just to fit a particular film.

Ahh okay, thanks.

Well what I've done, and i think this is correct, is crop it to 75% the height in 16:9 to make 2.35:1 in the underscan frame, then cropped a further 10% off the height for the overscan. Looks about right.

Although, I'd like to crop the WHOLE track, is there any way of doing this? 'Cause so far all I can do is 'Paste Event Attributes' which is a pain because the events have effects on them which I don't want to double up. Which is a problem I have anyway, I always want to know how you can paste event attributes without duplicating them...

What NLE are you using? Usually you can nest timelines/sequences. So you'd edit the whole thing normally, then put your timeline/sequence inside another one, and it should show up as one big clip. Then you apply whatever effects you want, and they'll get applied to everything.

Happy Holidays!

It looks like you're using Vegas. If you click on the Pan/Crop button at the end of the clip, you can see a drop down menu that says 'default'. If you click the drop down arrow, you'll find some cropping options for 4:3, 1:1, 1.78:1, and I think 1.85:1. You'll find that 2.35:1 is missing. So what I did was a little math (Width of Footage/Aspect you Want=New height of Footage -->1920/2.35=817) so what you'll need to do is hold either shift or control, (I can't recall right now), and then enter the new height value (817) on the left side of that window. Save that as your 2.35:1 crop preset, and you're all set.

Hope that helps, ask questions if it doesn't.

Steven

This is the BEST letterboxing/cropping tool ever!

http://www.videocopilot.net/presets.html?id=67

EDIT:If you want a png letterbox I have some here:
http://www.kraentertainment.com/free.html