Hey everyone,
I'm an Australian young film maker, studying Year 12 at highschool. A few months ago I created a 20 minute short film, using the beautiful AG-DVX100.

I regrettably shot in the 'in-camera' letterbox matte, with my 4:3 picture being reduced. I have just finished making the credits, and now need to add the same letterbox matte to it. It's being shown on a widescreen cinema, so if I don't do this the picture will not appear.

I run the NLE Adobe Premiere 6.5, and I was wondering if there was a way in which to mimmick the look I created on the DVX100.

I heard you can put a transparent Photoshop file over the top, with the black bars included, but this sounds like it could take years to render.

Any help would be appreciated.

well, i dont really have much to say, but since noone else is responding... If you transpose a photoshop file over the footage it will have to render every frame, instead of just the frames with transitions and "graphics" on them. This in turn means the project could take much much longer to render. So you are correct there. As far as getting those bars, I know you can change export settings to export as 16:9, but i dont know if that adds the bars or just squishes the video..sorry.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: particleman,

Hey thanks for the reply anyway!

Yeah I know, when you export in Premiere under the 16:9, it only squashes, and does not crop from the picture. A pity...

I've looked around on different forums, and as far as i can tell you have to add them over the footage. Hopefully someone will prove me wrong though, best of luck.

Hey particleman, I used the transparent photoshop image, imported just the single layer I created, and it rendered surprisingly quickly. Looks like it could do the trick.

Thanks again,

Chris

Chris - I just finished a 20 minute project using the DVX and did the exact same thing, yea it really isnt that big of a deal to render. I just leave it until the end and include in the final color correction render, since the whole thing is being rendered anyway. By the way, if you are going to shoot non anamorphic and box it out for widescreen, don't shoot with the bars on in the future. Best case is to envision it with the bars and add them later, that way if you decide to add a little more headroom to an image you have the information there to work with. Since you arent going to have true 16:9 res anywa you might as well have the info there to work with. If you absolutely have to have a box on the LCD then use masking tape on the screen, then at least you are framing 16:9 but it is picking up the whole 4:3 frame. Good luck w/ it!