A Certain Aspect or Just a Point of View?

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

I have a bit of a surprising dilemma with my new video to do with mixed aspect ratios.

I'm used to this, I've had to deal with them many times before with amvs but with movies this issue becomes trickier due to the relative quality of the images and the difference in framing of animation vs live action. I'm using a lot of sources and some of them are 35mm and others are 16mm sources. In less technical terms this means that some are uber widescreen and other are not-so-uber widescreen (2.35:1 vs 16:9)

I'm not a fan of having parts of a video have letterboxing, so I tend to conform sources to one aspect ratio and stick with that for the whole video. This leaves me with two possibilities:

1) Crop the left and right of the 35mm movies and make everything 16:9
2) Crop the top and bottom of the 16mm movies and make everything 2.35:1

I'm not sure which is going to be best. The former probably safest in terms of keeping what I want in the frame (I wont lose eyes or mouths on close ups, for example). The latter maintains the glory of the (undoubtedly prettier) 35mm movies.

So, which should I go for? Cut off the tops and bottoms or cut off the left and right sides?

Comments

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

When I'm in this situation, I look at two factors:

1) Are the majority of my clips in one aspect ratio? Then I use that one. Why not crop fewer clips, right? It's kind of a hassle to count clips, but you'll probably save time in the long run if you determine that, for example, 2/3 of your vid is 16:9. Then you only have to crop 1/3 of your total number of clips.

2) Are there particular clips that simply *can't* be cropped a certain way without losing too much visual information? This is tricky, and there's a lot you can do with resizing and zooming, but sometimes there are clips that just won't survive cropping. If more of your clips are happy at 2.35:1 than at 16:9, you can make the decision that way.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

What Laura says. Yep.

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

1 was tricky because there's a complete 50/50 split with aspects, so, I sortof went with 2 and decided on putting everything at 16:9.

The actuall reason for this choice was that I noticed that many of the 16:9 sources were actually filmed in academy 4:3 knowing that they were to be cropped for the cinema - this was a common practice in the 70s and quite an irony in this pro-anamorphic dvd world we live in. Hence, further cropping makes these sources look pretty dreadful.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Glad you were able to find a solution. (:

BTW, I love your "Singing in the Rain" icons!

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

If you can control where in particular you crop, frex if a 16:9 shot has all its action at the bottom and you can crop off the top without touching the bottom, then I say, go for the 2.35:1.

If it's gonna be an automatic thing where you crop equally on both edges, play it safe.