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

[dokidoki]

Along the lines of #3 / #7 for Butterfly & Yummy People.

[Zarxrax]

I usually would just use the resolution of whatever would occur the most in my video.
Like if my footage is mostly 4:3, I will make my video 4:3 and crop the sides off the widescreen footage.

It's better to crop the sides than the top and bottom. It's less noticable.

[Willen]

I think it would depend on the feel of the video. If you want a more "theatrical" presentation then cropping your 4:3 source to 16:9 would be the way to go.

Another option is to use the 16:9 material to emphasise a certain segment or to use it as a transition. The best example I can think of right now is Caldwell's "Engel". Fof the muscial bridge, from 2:49 to 3:15 the footage is letterboxed whereas the rest of the video is 4:3 fullframe.

[Bakadeshi]

normally under most conditions I would do option 3. sometimes though you just loose too much information with option 3, so I woould either try to actually pan and scan for real, moving the footage to get the optimal range of action, or if that doesn;t work either, I would crop the other source (fullscreen) top and bottom if that source doesn't loose as much as the widescreen one would. If I don't like how either source looks croped, I'd try and find some creative way to keep both if the idea of the video allows for it ;p

Ofcourse this is all theory since I have yet to have this problem in any of my videos. I have thought quite a bit on it though in the past.

[DJ_Izumi]

We're all agreed that Qyot27's method 'Of just scretching it out like a total noob' is the wrong way to go, right?

[TaranT]

This isn't exactly the same case, but it has a technique that could work: Hakura's "Sentance"
In other words, leave the footage as-is, but be creative with the presentation.

[Zero1]

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.

I'm curious, but 960x480 is an odd aspect ratio, how did you come to this? If it is anamorphic video @ 16:9, you would tend to crop out any borders and resize to 853 (or nearest the resize filter will allow, ie 854) and crop to 848x480 to keep it mod 16, and if you have to, 854/3x640 for the 4:3 (and crop where applicable), but scaling up whatever the filter is not optimal and a waste of bitrate/resources IMO.

In my opinion, a comprimise would be to crop the 16:9 to 704 (or keep 720 if no borders) and resize it vertically to:
405/6 and crop to 400 for 720 wide 16:9
396 and crop to 384 for 704 wide 16:9, or vertically scale to 400 and suffer the AR distortion.

As for the 4:3, you would probably crop and resize to 720x540/704x528 and crop to whatever you are using for the 16:9, so your 4:3 would now become 720x400 or 704x400/384. It's hard to find a best solution, but rather than keeping one source it's native resolution and crippling or stretching another source badly, this is sort of a comprimise between both.

I don't like upscaling, it's pointless IMO. If I find myself dealing with a mixed aspect video in the future, I'll probably have to hard code some mod16 borders, at least compression won't suffer as much as it could do.


As for Izumi, with all due respect, you seem to like using strange resolutions such as 640x360 and 856x480. First off yes, 640x360 is 16:9 square pixels, but it's not mod 16. You should ideally resize to 640x360 and then crop to 352. There are a number of reasons, one of which being it avoids borks and offscreen macroblocks, padding etc.

Same goes for 856x480. 16:9 for 480 high material is 853.3rx480, but the nearest to this is 854x480. Again this is not mod 16, so you should resize to this and crop to 848x480.

It's actually a little more technical to that owing to scanlines, cropping before they encode the DVD etc, but that's way out of the scope of this thread.

Here is a semi explanation about mod 16 in this post, also covers a bit of pan and scan/adding borders and why you should not use bicubic/Lanczos filters for downscaling.

[Zero1]

What the hell, needs more link (or edit button)

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=58533

[Scintilla]

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.

I'm curious, but 960x480 is an odd aspect ratio, how did you come to this? If it is anamorphic video @ 16:9, you would tend to crop out any borders and resize to 853 (or nearest the resize filter will allow, ie 854) and crop to 848x480 to keep it mod 16, and if you have to, 854/3x640 for the 4:3 (and crop where applicable), but scaling up whatever the filter is not optimal and a waste of bitrate/resources IMO.

If I was editing at a square pixel aspect ratio, I'd resize the 16:9 sources to 848x480 and the 4:3 sources to 640x480. But usually I just keep the 4:3 sources at 720x480, so the 16:9 sources have to go to 960x480 to match.

[Zero1]

I see, I thought as much, but to be blunt I couldn't be bothered to check

That and not many people intentionally stick to CCIR601 for AMVs (since obviously the majority are intended for square pixel monitors, as you know).