Is there a way to change widescreen to 4 by 3 or change 4 by 3 to widescreen? I need to edit those two aspects together into one seamless clip.

Any tricks or techniques?

Yes and Yes.

For anamorphic footage, you can create a "pan and scan" for making it 4:3.
For 4:3 footage you can crop the top and bottom to fake anamorphic.

You didn't say your editing system so I cannot provide any specific tips, but it is possible and most people won't know the difference.
Hope this helps,
-C

I would create a 720x480 anamorphic sequence, drop the 16:9 footage in and then drop the 4:3 footage in and pull the frame in to fill the screen. Yes you'll lose some quality on the 4:3 footage, but it will all fit and give you the seamless look you're going for. Render it out and you should be GTG.

I am using Premiere Pro 2.0 and there does not seem to be an option for anamorphic. Unless by anamorphic you mean widescreen.

What I've done is drop the 4 by 3 into the widescreen timeline and stretched the picture. This works, but there is a slight blurring effect.

Be careful about "stretching" 4:3 footage, as it adds new meaning to the phrase "the camera adds 10 pounds"...

Hopefully what you want to do is do a crop (pan/crop in Vegas, not sure in other NLE's) of the top and bottom of the 4:3 frame (with any luck the shots have enough "headroom" to do this). It's going to soften up your resolution, possibly significantly, but will look "right" proportionally. The other alternative is to go for 4:3 final product (again that awkward stretching, but now the widescreen TV will do it for you!), and do like the big time movies do when they pan/crop the widescreen original to create the "fullscreen" version (a bit of a strange name for it, but I guess it was for "laymen" who didn't like the "partial" letterbox screen...).

Either way you need to make some adjustments to the footage shot in the "different" frame ratio once you choose what your final frame ratio will be for you finished project.

Another trick I've seen used is to use some sort of colored/textured background layered "behind" 4:3 footage to eliminate the "ugly" black "pillarboxes" in a 16:9 project - this could help if your footage isn't amenable to cropping?

Dave...

Thanks...the layers idea might be a good one for this situation.

Actually, I did not stretch the video, I enlarged it just enough to cover the wide of the widescreen (viewable portion). It seems to be ok on a tube TV monitor. I guess the final test is a widescreen.

If I need to place 4X3 video on a 16X9 timeline, what I try to do is shrink the 4X3 video down a little and make it behave more like a window or a floating pane on some kind of backdrop. I've done simple backdrops of a solid color or whip up some motion graphics in After Effects. Either way, I find the end product looks slightly more polished than if I were to scale up the 4X3.

In Premiere Pro, another way to do things is to do everything on a 4X3 timeline and just crop the left and right edges of the widescreen frames. It will look just as good, if not better than images that result from upscaling.

In Premiere Pro, another way to do things is to do everything on a 4X3 timeline and just crop the left and right edges of the widescreen frames. It will look just as good, if not better than images that result from upscaling.

thanks Shawn...I think this is the way to go.