Converting a 4:3 movie to a 16:9 format. Possible?

[russurquhart1]

Hi,

My limited understaind of deallilng with 16:9 video, is that it had to be shot in that manner in order to produce a 16:9 DVD.

But, i was thinking, is there anyway to convert a 4:3 video to a 16:9 format? Let me explain what i was wondering if i could do. I have some old video's that i wanted to convert to a 16:9 format, for my own personal use.

I want to take them to DSP and then burn it as a 16:9 dvd.

Is there any software that would take a 720 X 480 video and convert it to the 854 X 480 (i think) resolution needed for a 16:9 resolution?

Thanks


Russ

[OmegaSupreme]

Why would you want to do that?

In order to change the aspect ratio to 16:9 you would have to either:

1. Stretch the video horizontally, distorting the picture.

2. Crop the video, chopping off part of the top and bottom of the picture.

When a Hollywood film gets reformatted to 4:3, part of the picture gets chopped off. Hollywood 16:9 films are good because they maintain the original formatting and aspect ratio of the film.

My advice, keep the original formatting and aspect ratio of the video, unless your trying to do an artistic reinterpretation.

[tgpo]

The best way would be to produce a letterbox effect, such as in FCP. It'll mask out 4:3 video to 16:9