How to convert 4:3 footage to Widescreen footage

Hey creative people!! how are you all!!

Any ideas?? Thanks for your help!! Have an awesome day!

A good technique that a lot of people use is to have the normal 4:3 footage in the center, then behind it stretch it and add a lens/camera or fast blur to it

So it would look something like this:

(Random WW2 image, done in photoshop)

If that’s what you mean

Put black bars on the top and the bottom, et voila!

Blow it up and letter box it. You’ll have a bit of pan and scan on your hands, probably.

There are also some new-fangled techniques that kind of stretch out the edges of the picture horizontally (you could achieve this with a mesh warp in AE). That’s fine for locked off shots, but looks pretty rubbish if the camera moves.

If it’s for broadcast: Stretch the image just a little in the horizontal direction, then blow it up uniformly until the left and right edges sit exactly on the safe margin. This is a kind of cheaty pillar box that no-one will ever see on a TV because the black edges are out of safe.

Pillar box it – This is my preferred choice. 4×3 exists as a format; why try and hide it? For many years widescreen films were letterboxed to fit them into a standard 4×3 TV format. Occasionally films were pan and scanned, so that they would fill the screen, but most were a complete travesty. You lose everything – composition, framing, often even the action. Particularly if it’s a super widescreen format 1:1.185 or wider, the resulsts were particularly bad. Once you take into account the safe margin, you were losing half of the entire picture.

4×3 doesn’t fit into a 16×9 box. Get used to it.

-f.

Put black bars on the top and the bottom, et voila!

He’s going the other way. You mean black bars left and right, n’est-ce pas?

-f.

4×3 doesn’t fit into a 16×9 box. Get used to it.

-f.

HAHA . well. theres a plug-in Instant HD Pro that offers sharp, high-quality, artifact-free output of progressive frames from interlaced material. Also has other features and a pan and scan selection.

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-instant-hd-adv/

Brian, i like that plugin. but check this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDMp7O9TbsE I think that this guy has the best upscale result I’ve ever seen o_O
but its too complicated for me, im using instant hd, and Im satisfied

Brian, i like that plugin. but check this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDMp7O9TbsE I think that this guy has the best upscale result I’ve ever seen o_O
but its too complicated for me, im using instant hd, and Im satisfied

I think you need to be a rocket scientist to understand all this. I vote for the plug-in.

Or you can run it through Unlikely Technology Inc.’s nuclear powered deinterlacitron XL40000000000 , at the cost of just $100 per second.

Re:vision fields kit is quite good for cunning deinterlacing too.

-f.

Hey guys,

thank you all for the input. Actually I have this footage which is SD NTSC and its for a DVD release. This company shoot in HD but for those ramdom reasons they had problems and provided SD. My company came out with this awesome product anyways, but SD and client was looking for at least SD Widescreen (of course I explained this was not a viable solution in terms of selling a product)

As Brian suggested, I had tried HD instant with amazing results but probably the render will take a couple of days since we have a 3 hours DVD .

As a side note, just got the 12 cores Mac Tower and its a beast. I did some renders with VH projects and it’s extremely fast. Pricey ,for worth the money.