How to "reverse letterbox" 4:3 video?

[gonzoron]

Hi,

I'm trying to author a DVD of home movies. Most of the movies were taken with a panasonic widescreen camcorder, but a few were taken with a canon digital camera, which outputs in fullscreen.

I'm using Adobe Encore and Premiere, and I'm trying to make it such that I don't have to switch settings on the TV once the DVD starts. If I set the TV to 4:3, the widescreen menus and video clips are squished. If I set the TV to 16:9, the fullscreen video is stretched.

What I want is a way to convert the fullscreen clips to widescreen by adding "letterboxing" on the sides. (I don't know if it's still called letterboxing if it's on the sides and not the top and bottom). Is this possible with my software? Is there another (preferrably free or cheap) program I can use to do it?

Thanks,
Ron

[Phase52009]

What I want is a way to convert the fullscreen clips to widescreen by adding "letterboxing" on the sides. (I don't know if it's still called letterboxing if it's on the sides and not the top and bottom).

Hello Ron;
When you take a 4:3 image and convert it to 16:9 with black bars on the side it's called pillarboxing.
No idea who came up with these terms, but here you go.

To convert a 4:3 image to 16:9, such that when it plays back on a widescreen telly, it will appear as a full screen 4:3 image with black bars down either side, all you have to do is change the clips aspect ratio to 33. Now I'm using Final Cut pro on a Mac and there's actually a setting for this in the "Motion" tab under "Distort" for the clip. You should be able to do this in PREMIERE, as it's very similair. Problem is I can't tell you exactly how to in premiere.

Changeing the aspect ratio for the video clip or photo to "33" squeezes the images horizontally. Effectively making it an anamorphic 16:9 clip. When played on a widescreen telly it will do the same as the other anamorphic widescreen footage you ahve and "spread out" and appear in 16:9.

If you make all you video footage anamorphic widescreen in this way, all you need do is set the DVD up as widescreen.
Depending on the DVD authoring software you are using this setting may be "16:9/letterbox" or "16:9/PanScan".

Hope that helps you along the way a bit.
Robert.

[gonzoron]

Sorry for the bump. I tried to do what Phase52009 suggested, but couldn't find the way to do it in Premiere. Does anyone know how to pillarbox fullscreen video specifically in premiere? Thanks...

[guns1inger]

Set the project as 16:9, then import your footage. Premiere should automatically set the attributes of each clip as it imports, and they should look ok in the preview (i.e. pillarboxed where necessary).