What do you do when faced with sources of mixed aspect ratio

DJ_Izumi · Post by **DJ_Izumi** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:19 am

I'm curious how different editors would approach this situation.

If you were editing a video with different source animes of different aspect ratios, let's say you had Full Metal Panic which is 4:3 in aspect ratio and you had Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid which would be 16:9 and anamorphic. (For the sake of this, assume none of the content 16:9 content has been scaled down to 640x360 or anything. Ya know, like certian fansubs or the weirdness of the Gunslinger Girl DVDs)

Would you...

1) Scale down and letter box the 16:9 anime to be approximately 640x360 (720x360, 640x352... You know what I mean. It varies but you get it.) with the letter boxes making it 4:3 and 480p and then leave the 4:3 anime alone, resulting in obvious difference in the source material as some scenes would be letter boxed and others would be full screen. (I've seen this in a many AMVs)

2) Scale the 16:9 anime down to approximately 640x360, crop the top and bottom off the 4:3 anime to make it faux wide screen so they'll be uniform at approximately 640x360. (I've done this many times)

3) Crop the left and right sides off the 16:9 anime to make it 4:3 and approximately 640x480 so it will be uniform with the 4:3 anime. Basicly pan and scan like when wide screen movies are adapted to television.

4) Attempt to eliminate one of the sources from your project

5) Don't attempt the project at all.

Recently I employed option 3 for Resident Eva: Apocalypse because I used both the Evangelion TV series and End Of Evangelion. I feel less visual information was lost from cropping the sides of the movie instead of croping the top and bottom of the TV series. Also the video was able to be encoded worked at at 640x480, a much higher resolution option over option 2 and it doesn't show the obvious difference in option 1.

But I'd like to hear what other editors have been employing when encountering this situation.

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:42 am

Depends on the relation between the the sources. If one format has a strong majority (more than 2/3), than I'd use 2) or 3), depending which has the majority. It the relation is somewhere between 1:2 and 1:1, I would decide for an intermediate format, e.g. 720 x 480, format the 4:3 clips to 720 x 540, the 16:9 clips to 854 x 480 and crop both to 720 x480, using pan and scan. That way you lose from both sources the same amount.

Another approach is to keep them both 720 x 480, like they come from DVD. But it might look a little bit weird, especially if it's "the same" source.

Option 1) I'd never do, the same for 5). If there is only a small number of clips in one format, 4) maybe an option, but only if I would find similar clips.

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:55 am

Well, considering I don't respect the sanctity of 4:3, the couple of times I've had mixed sources like that I just forced them into a 16:9 aspect ratio without cropping (for the one Eva video, I did crop a bit off of EOE since I used 2:1 on that, but I only cropped it down to 848x480, and horiztonally resized the TV footage to 848x480 to match it).

The first time I did it, it went unnoticed - I'd assume it was because of the blanket old film filter I used. The second time, I don't really mind it, as horizontal stretching doesn't bother me (vertical does, though), but others commented on it.

DJ_Izumi · Post by **DJ_Izumi** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:03 am

Wait... So you mean you will take something like a 4:3 anime and just resize it to be 16:9, stretching it horozontally, totally screwing up the image's aspect ratio and... and... You do this on purpose?

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:10 am

DJ_Izumi wrote:Wait... So you mean you will take something like a 4:3 anime and just resize it to be 16:9, stretching it horozontally, totally screwing up the image's aspect ratio and... and... You do this on purpose?

Yes, that's correct. It's comparable to watching HDTVs with 'Stretch mode' enabled.

Coffee 54 · Post by **Coffee 54** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:31 am

For my video, Shooting Stars, I adjusted 4:3 footage over to 16:9, but I didn't crop, I clipped. Well mostly clipped anyway. There was a tiny bit of stretching, hopefully unnoticable stretching, just to make sure everything important made it in frame.

The reason I scaled to 16:9 instead of 4:3 is explained on the info page:

The Incredibly Talented and Humble Coffee 54 wrote:I did this for two reasons, one artist, one technical. The artistic being I wanted to pick one ratio without adding any noticeable distortion and Crest looked better cut at the top and bottom then Banner III did cut at the sides. The technical reason? I saw a chance to cut down on file size and I took it.

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:40 am

Coffee 54 wrote: ... but I didn't crop, I clipped.

What's the difference between crop and clip?

As far as I understand, both means to cut away parts of the clips.

Coffee 54 · Post by **Coffee 54** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:02 am

Keeper of Hellfire wrote:
Coffee 54 wrote: ... but I didn't crop, I clipped.
What's the difference between crop and clip? As far as I understand, both means to cut away parts of the clips.

Yeah your right, I'm used to thinking in Premiere terms. When you crop in Premiere everthing gets all stretchy, when you clip it doesn't. While I was preparing my footage I was using AviSynth, so I did Crop, not Clip.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:09 pm

6) Horizontally upsize the anamorphic 16:9 footage to 960x480 (NTSC), then scale up the 4:3 footage to 960x640 (after IVTCing of course, with a sharp resizer of course, and perhaps with some additional filtering like Didée's IIP, which is meant specifically for upsampling to HD resolutions) and set my Premiere Pro project to 960x480, allowing me to letterbox the 4:3 footage as appropriate for each individual scene.

Of course, I never actually <i>finished</i> the one project that required this approach.

Oh yeah, "All for the Best" required this too, didn't it?:

7) Horizontally upsize the anamorphic 16:9 footage to 960x480 (NTSC), then set my Premiere Pro project to 720x480, allowing me to pan and scan the 16:9 footage as appropriate for each individual scene.

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:59 pm

I personally would do number one and be clever about the transitions between scenes at different aspect ratios. i.e Such as in this one or, if not like that, I'd at least try to make the transition between the aspects not a distraction to the viewer such as in Tash's video, Flesh and Blood near the end. If your willing to pan and scan, Scintilla's methods would be better.