Experimenting and finding things out for yourself is always a good thing. A lot of my knowledge came from doing precisely that first and then doing it for real later.

I've just put up some screen grabs on my website from a film of mine that i've been working on.

It turned out that the camera I was using was cropping a 4:3 frame to make it 16:9, and my video assist VHS tapes show the damn thing cropping as I rolled!

Bearing in mind I was using a 2/3" 3 chip CCD DVCPRO camera ... and because of the cropping I was getting better results with an XL-1 ...

Makes you think.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Thanks guys!
I've learned a lot in this present conversation.
I see it's a little trickier than I thought....

I think I came across wrong. Shooting with the Canon XL1 in 16x9 mode isnt bad, I just didnt see a big enough difference to say, "Im not buying a camera (such as the Panosonic ag-DVX100) because it wont do a "un true" anamorphic 16x9.
Just understand that you will have to wait a little longer on rendering time to compress your image on your editing system (that is to say, if you dont compress it, it will play on televisions all stretched out, to reach the top and bottom of the screen, unless your TV has a 16x9 feature.So, to show your friends a vhs copy, youll want to compress it.)
As for PAL and NTSC. I love PAL 25fps is fantastic. No one in the UK worries about "film look" Theyve pretty much already got it.
Finally, are the pics from "Forever and a night" what you shot on the xl1? They look good, but if so, i just wanted to submit one thing for consideration, then Im done.

XL1 in 16x9 mode



XL1, shot in standard 4:3, cropped in post.



Im just saying, I dont notice enough of a difference to say "I wont use that Panosonic, because it cant shoot 16x9, and I want to letter box.

Richard, nice looking site and grabs BTW. Good work.
R. Michael
Tizzy Entertainment

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

I have researched it further (other sites then the afore mentioned link) and it sems that it is correct, and finally a simple explanation is what made it make sense to me.

It says, because it is digitally compressing the image to 16x9, you have more resolution, crammed into a smaller space. According to what i read, they are saying it isnt that cropping will make the 4:3 image have less quality then before, just that the electronic 16x9 has better res then standard 4:3 anyway.

So, if you have it, shoot in it. If not, dont worry about cropping. Your not loosing res, your just loosing those parts of the picture.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

I'm glad you like the site, it's still not finished yet ... logo and everything to come.

Those pics were some Panasonic DVCPRO model I can't remember that was 4:3 cropped to 16:9 in the camera.

I don't have the footage I shot with the XL-1 to hand yet, which used it's 16:9 mode. That's mostly because it was the 1st A.D's camera!

Basically, I think you've got the nub of my gist now Tizzy. Don't crop in Premiere like I was forced to once!

One other thing to note: the DVCPRO pics that you see there have been severely mangled by the Avid I was forced to initally use. I ended up buying a mac just so I wouldn't have to use the dratted Avid again.

Basically, it's amazing those pics look as good as they do considering the amount of processing they've been through. I've recaptured the footage again since, but I was compiling the site in a hurry and found my old backup DVD's!

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Funny, my pics are out of Avid as well. I am interested to see your XL1 pics once youv got em. Let us know.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

Through a contact at a local university (not mentioning which one), I was able to borrow not only the shoot equipment but also use their avid editing suites.

My footage was mangled because they'd rigged the things up with a DVCPRO to DV convertor bridge. Then I had to recompress from Avid's own codec to Quicktime DVCPRO in order to export out and edit on my own system.

Thankfully Mac's can just plug into DVCPRO equipment with a firewire lead ... which PC's i've found cannot unless you've bought a Matrox RT2500 card. This seems to be the only editing card capable of understanding the slightly incompatible DVCPRO video signals.

You've got to love technology eh?

On a slight aside for the minute, i'd be interested to see "Intersection". Your stills look very well lit indeed. I'm hoping you'll get the chance to submit it to festivals over here in blighty.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

I should be putting it up on this site soon. I just REALLY wantt o do some color correction first. It irritates me, because I see all my lighting flaw (there arent stills of those LOL) so we will see. Of course, i will let you folks know when its coming.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

In relation to this entire discussion... I recently shot a DV feature on a PD-150 in 4:3 and have been editing in Premiere in 4:3 and was planning on blackening out the top/bottom for the 16:9 look (I had read many arguments pro and con against internal 16:9 modes, so I played it safe and shot 4:3)

However, I was playing around with some test footage and realized that if I input the 4:3 into Premiere with Premiere in 16:9 mode, it automatically crops and it's in 16:9, but I wasn't sure if there would be pixelation loss/degradation.

Anyone done this and does it impact image quality?

PETE

from what I have read Pete, it doesnot. It seems to be, that if you shoot in digital 16x9 (not true anamorphic) it just compresses your resolution, giving you better res. With the cropping, you will obviously loose the part blacked out, but no res loss on the actuall image. It should remain the same as it would be in standard 4:3 My only concer would be resizing cotrol if you import it that way. Are you able to shift a clip up or down in case it cuts off to much head, or bottom? I have used the letterboxing to corect bad framing before. Im just wondering if you still have an image beneath it to manipulate. If not, I would avoid it to leave yourself some options. Then again, if it didnt happen often, you could just re import that clip without and resize. My Two pennies.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

Are you sure it's cropping it and not stretching it out. I haven't used premiere in a long time but in any other app I use if you map 4:3 DV to 16:9 DV the difference in the pixel aspect ratio between the two formats causes the image to be stretched.

Like Tizzy said no matter where you do the crop (in camera or in post) you are throwing away resolution. The advantage to doing this in the camera, according to Wilt, applies only to canon (and some panasonic) cameras due to the pixel shift technology they use. Pixel Shift is when the camera's green ccd is offset from the red and blue ccds in order to give the output a perceived increase in resolution... apparently this is some magical video engineering mojo.

For more information about this look at the article on dv.com entitled "Understanding Your Camera's CCD"

The "digital anamorphic" process in all 4:3 cameras crops the top and bottom of the frame and stretches the remaining image over the rest of the ccd. That image has lost resolution and you'll never get it back. What Wilt suggests is that on canon and panasonic cameras the stretch results in fewer artifacts then other cameras and in the compression phase these cameras seem to compress the image better thereby retaining more of the cropped resolution.

So to make a long story short (tooo late) you are apparently better off shooting 4:3 on your pd-150 and cropping it since sony cameras don't appear to benefit from doing it inside the camera.

PETE: If you import 4:3 footage into Premiere with 16:9 settings, then you'll end up with people's head looking "squashed" and generally not good.

My parents TV does this when it misinterprets a 4:3 signal as widescreen.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Finally, just to wrap this whole thing up, i've found a website that explains this whole sordid topic with both clarity and detail.

http://members.macconnect.com/users/b/ben/widescreen/index.html

Enjoy.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

yeah that's the same site linked to from the article on wilt's site.

quote:

---

Unfortunately, only the Canons and Panasonics look as good as Ben's pictures show. These cameras employ "pseudo-frame" resampling courtesy of vertical pixel shift, in the same way they get decent frame mode images. As a result, the images have more vertical resolution than purely field-based resampling provides, even if they aren't as good as using an anamorphic or a true 16:9 CCD.

Sonys do a much poorer job of fake 16:9; they look equivalent to performing the same resampling in a field-based NLE like Final Cut Pro, with an added and excessive vertical edge enhancement used in a losing battle to retain perceived sharpness.

---

Personally, if the finishing format is standard-def video I wouldn't use a 16:9 feigned anamorphic stretching option. Squeezing 475 lines (for NTSC) into ~360 isn't all that mathematically happy and seems to result in artifacts which appear to be evident in the above grabs. Additionally, the fidelity of the added resolution is questionable at best. I'd say compose for 16:9, but shoot 4:3 and letterbox in post unless you have an actual anamorphic lens adapter.

Nota "Super PAL" Mono

I think that we've just demonstrated that there are too many pros and cons with each method.

Try cropping in post with a 4:3 image, then shoot the same test with the 16:9 mode on.

See what YOU think.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/