Patrick Zaw – Blog

1920x1080 2.35 letterbox

Click on the image above to get the png.

I searched all over the interweb for this but couldn’t find it so I decided to just create it myself.  If you’re trying to letterbox a 1920×1080 video so that it ends up being the typical cinematic format of 2.35:1 (actually 2.39:1) then you can use this PNG image as your last layer of the composite.   If you’re confused why it’s 2.39 vs 2.35 but still called 2.35 read here.

To break it down, the image size 1920×1080 exactly with black bars on top and bottom with each bar being 138 pixels high.  The result is a transparent area of 1920×803 or in other words 2.39:1 where the rest of the composite layers can be seen.

Some people prefer to just crop in their NLE but I found my approach to be much more useful for  a few reasons:

1. You can implement the letterboxing across the entire project without having to set crop settings on each clip or track
2. The letterboxing is just a composite so any of the tracks or clips beneath it can be repositioned vertically without changing the letterboxing.  This is tough to do when you use cropping becuase you’re always readjusting the crop size to however you’re adjusting the vertical positioning.
3. I’m not absolutely sure about this, but it seems as though preview playbacks and rendering are a bit faster compared to cropping. 

I’m mainly using this technique on Adobe Premiere.  For those of you using Sony Vegas you should know your Pan/Crop settings can already handle this for you, but still you have to set that on every track but my method should alleviate that work.   And of course if you want a different aspect ratio, just adjust the image or make  new one.