So I'm making a prison movie in two locations, neither of which I can return to. Principal photography for the major action of the film took place two months ago in a former police station jail, which has since been torn down. The remainder of the film, a two minute epilogue, was shot last week in an actual district courtroom on special permission from the judge, with 40 actors and extras. My DP was drastically ill and sent a substitute. Same camera, a Panasonic AG-DVX100B. One problem...the jail scenes were shot 16:9 and the courtroom scenes 4:3.

If there were no way you could gather the resources together to reshoot the courtroom scene, what would you do? I'm editing in Vegas 9.

Big booboo! Make the court scene look like it's on TV, like Court TV, and place it in a scene. If that doesn't work you can crop, or zoom.

uff... the exact same thing happened to me once... you could tell right away that the video was stretched..... or cropped, good luck on that one, i'd do the Tv court like Indetalk suggested.

I suggest at least try to crop it. I use Vegas, it's relatively easy to change the aspect ratio and manually crop. If you use layers and if needed some black boxes to cover things from the media generator tab. It may work out.
Alternatively try getting hold of Adobe after effects. You can do a lot with it, fixing an aspect ratio should be easy. There's some great tutorials on: www.videocopilot.net/tutorials

Letterbox it. Just like countevil said. Take two black layers and put them on top and bottom just like you shot it 16:9. If someone's head gets cut off then just move the frame to accommodate. If the boxes are placed in the exact location of the original 16:9 it shouldn't make a difference. Maybe I am being naive but this doesn't seem that hard of a fix. Good luck and let us know how this works out.

PS- If you could post what you did that would be great. I would love to see what technique you went with.

Thanks, guys. I'll probably try it both ways. Funny you should mention TV...I had a dream (nightmare?) last night that I tried to tell the producer "well, I wanted it to sort of look like an episode of Perry Mason, so that's why it's not widescreen."

Another good reason to have an external monitor on set, probably would have noticed right away if you were watching the footage on an external monitor.

The DVX100 series never had a true "anamorphic", so it's not like you've lost actual resolution. If you create a 16x9 frame from the 4x3 footage, and even in After Effects or even your NLE you created a new anamorphic 16x9 image, it will not truly be a degraded image.

It's not as bad as you think.

You can safely zoom in and eliminate 10% of the picture (especially if going straight to DVD), but that's it.

As sonnyboo said, the DVX100 dose not shot true anamorphic. Just make a 16x9 mat in
so photo editing program or in vegas and overlay that on your footage. You can pan around
the frame but do not zoom on it, if you do you will take a hit on the resolution.

It will work out great. Sometimes thing just work out!

Terry

Visions of pan and scan movies for TV lol.

Just learned something new about my NLE...Vegas has a "match project output ratio" button as part of its pan/crop window. It just changes the frame to a 16:9 which I can then slide up and down the original 4:3 footage. This has gone a long way toward solving my problem and will hopefully prevent my ass getting kicked by the producer.

Before I had the HV20, which shoots 16:9 natively, I would always shoot full frame 4:3 and crop to whatever widescreen format I was going to finish with, gives you a little more flexibility in post to reframe things if needed.