Letterboxing in AE 5.5?
 

Anyone take anamorphic footage and LTBX in AE 5.5? I try but the resulting footage looks very bad. I've tried just changing the Y-scale to 75%. It looks right but when I render there are SEVERE aliasing problems when the camera does any fast motion. I've also tried importing the footage tagged as widescreen and nesting it in a standard 4x3 comp, same look as described earlier.

My other option is cropping in Premiere 6.5 and I can't get that to work AT ALL!

So anyone have any answers? The only reason I need to do it is to send a screener to a client so they can see what it will look like properly framed, (they don't have a 16x9 TV). I want it to look good though so any suggestions?

In Premiere I think you should do something like this. Create a
new 4:3 (YES, *NOT* a widescreen project) and import your
16:9 widescreen footage. Put it in the timeline. Right-click on the
footage and somewhere in that menu is an option like maintain
aspect ratio etc. I don't have Premiere running anymore, so can't
check what it was called. That should letterbox your footage.

In AE you should somewhere select to use the best rendering it
can do I think. If I remember correctly the default is not set to
highest quality somewhere.

Thanks Rob,

Part of the problem with the Premiere "Maintain Aspect Ratio" thing is some of the footage was dubbed from DigiBeta to DV. It's squeezed but the aspect ratio is 720x480. So it IS maintaining aspect ratio for those clips.

I did figure a work around. I de-interlaced it in AE by importing it twice, one with Lower field first, the other Upper field first, then stacked them with the Upper field first on top at 50% transperancy. The old way of doing "Magic Bullet" like progressive scan on the cheap. ANyway, it took care of all my problems.

That is not the aspect ratio. That is your resolution. All widescreen
captured footage will just be in 720x480. The pixel and/or frame
aspect ratio will/should be different! Thus, if not, you need to set
the correct ratio's in Premiere first (check project settings of a
16:9 project to get the good values) on the footage BEFORE you
can do Maintain Aspect Ratio.

This is probably due to the 16:9 flag not being on since the footage
isn't original DV but DigiBeta. Then you need to set the flag
manually (easy in Vegas, not sure how to do that in Premiere).