cropping 16:9 to 4:3 without letterbox
 

Hi people

This is rather a basic question but I can't seem to do it right. I need to crop a widescreen video to regular 4:3 in Vegas.

The video that I'm working with is a Mpeg-2 file 720x480, pixel aspect ratio of 0.889 and standard NTSC 29.970fps

I need to render this to a 4:3 by cropping off the left and right edges, not by letterboxing.

How?

Open a 4x3 Project.
Open Event Pan/Crop.
Right click on your 16x9 clip and select "Match Output Aspect"

That doesn't look like any widescreen ratio I've ever heard of.
NTSC DV is 0.9091, NTSC widescreen is 1.2121, PAL DV is 1.0926 and PAL widescreen is 1.4568.
If you're rendering this to NTSC, you should just be able to drop it on a Vegas timeline without needing to crop it.

Won't that just letterbox it? That's not really what he's trying to do.

I haven't done this in a long time, but it's fully possible to not only crop the 16:9 to 4:3 (cropping sides), but with pan/zoom, you can pretty easily use keyframes to do a real "pan and scan" approach (where you move the 4x3 crop around left to right wherever you want it for that particular scene).

Just out of curiosity Ali, would these just happen to be your video/audio specs ?

--- Video Information ---
Video Codec MPEG2
Frame Width (pixels): 720
Frame Height (pixels): 480
Storage Aspect Ratio("SAR")" 1.500
Pixel Aspect Ratio ("PAR"): 0.889
Display Aspect Ratio ("DAR"): 1.333
Frames Per Second: 29.970
Video Bitrate (kbps): 8000
Broadcast standard: NTSC


--- Audio Information ---

Audio Codec AC3
Audio Sample Rate (Hz): 48000
Audio Bitrate(kbps): 192
Audio Bitrate Type CBR
Audio Channel Count 2

720 x 480 is already 4 x 3 SD. It sounds like you have a letterbox downconversion on SD. You could enlarge your image until the letterbox is gone and the right and left edges are pushed off of the screen but you would probably loose some image quality.

This is called a center cut extraction and done all the time from a HD master. Is your original footage HD?

-C