unnecessary cropping?

[stretchweider]

senior editor at work will output finished edit in 3 flavours:cropped for 4:3, cropped for 16:9 and no crop for output to web,

i'm sat there watching and thinking there's no need to do all that work, surely the final output can be flagged so that it appears in correct aspect ratio depending on the tv you watch on,am i right? or is he?

we shoot all footage in 16:9 on a panny hvx200 or sony z1,
the editors are using FCP 5.1.4 & 6, iDVD for burning, (got DVDSP4 as well), on both powerPC and Intel Mac's.
they drop all 16:9 clips onto a 4:3 sequence in FCP to give it bars,please don't ask me why.

Put my mind at rest please someone.

[edDV]

senior editor at work will output finished edit in 3 flavours:cropped for 4:3, cropped for 16:9 and no crop for output to web,

i'm sat there watching and thinking there's no need to do all that work, surely the final output can be flagged so that it appears in correct aspect ratio depending on the tv you watch on,am i right? or is he?

we shoot all footage in 16:9 on a panny hvx200 or sony z1,
the editors are using FCP 5.1.4 & 6, iDVD for burning, (got DVDSP4 as well), on both powerPC and Intel Mac's.
they drop all 16:9 clips onto a 4:3 sequence in FCP to give it bars,please don't ask me why.

Put my mind at rest please someone.

Curious way to use the word "crop".

For 4:3 the answer is obvious. They are chopping the sides to 1440x1080 and down scaling to 720x480 for "full screen" DVD or 704x480i for SD TV release. I'm assuming here that "safe title" rules were followed during production. If not, then they may be resizing into "safe action" area to keep graphics in view on overscan TV sets.

For 16:9 nothing should need cropping unless "safe title" rules were ignored during production. Otherwise they are resizing to "action safe" with a border all around.

they drop all 16:9 clips onto a 4:3 sequence in FCP to give it bars,please don't ask me why.

Put my mind at rest please someone.

That would be for a 4:3 release, not 16:9. That would be a letterbox version.

[stretchweider]

all footage is downconverted in capture from HDV to SD from the Z1's
Panny footage is shot in SD.shoulda mentioned.