Letter-boxing vs. fullscreen: what's your opinion?

[AngelOfTheDark]

So, half way through making my AMV for this year's JACON (I want to enter it in the contest) it suddenly occurs to me that the footage being in wide-screen format may be a problem as far as the rules of the contest go. I originally intended to use letter-boxing but the rules for the contest have not yet been posted, even though the convention is in early May, and my attempts to contact the AMV coordinator have thus far been fruitless. Now I find myself in a bit of a conundrum. You see, the safe thing to do would be to go back, and change my original source footage into full-screen format and basically start from scratch again. But I'm already 3 minutes in to a 5 minute and 40 second video. On top of that, it took me ages to actually lip-sync Yubaba as well as I've done. (Do you have any idea how difficult it is to lip-sync using Yubaba? And I'm anal about timing. The few times in the video it doesn't match up perfectly, where there's nothing more I can do to match it, drive me nuts.) I'm reluctant to let all that work go to waste. Is there some way to alter my video to change it from wide- to full-screen without losing very much (if any) quality in the post-production phase? Say, I finish it in wide screen format and change it after that? Or, what would you do in my situation? Has anyone been to JACON and remember the rules about formats from previous years? Thank you.

~Lulu

[Pwolf]

Is there some way to alter my video to change it from wide- to full-screen without losing very much (if any) quality in the post-production phase? Say, I finish it in wide screen format and change it after that?

yes and sure... i don't see why letter boxing would be a problem either... technically you are still submitting a "fullscreen" video.

if you wanted to convert your letter boxed video to true full screen (ill use that lightly and it means no letterboxing/borders... 4:3) all you'd have to do it chop off the letter boxes and chop off the sides of the video... and resize... not really a good idea so don't do it unless you have to.

i edit all my videos in 720x480 off the dvds they came from and then do all my resizing and cropping after that.

Pwolf

[JaddziaDax]

I'd just letterbox if it were me

[Illia Sadri]

If you are working with widescreen footage stick with it. Once the rules go up then you should be able to either letterbox if you have to or some contests don't care if it is letterboxed 3:4 or proper 16:9 considering that many contests re-encode videos to meet a uniform standard in terms of bitrate and framerate (guaranteed that people always send just about anything under the sun)

Only time you should crop is in the event that you are working with multiple footages which involve both 4:3 and 16:9 segments.