Hello,

I'm filming a band on the roof of a YMCA building at the weekend and I'm wondering if I should venture into Widescreen format. I'm only using a Panasonic NV GS 180 and I don't really understand if switching to widescreen will cause quality and editing problems.

Please can someone advise me?

Thanks
Robin

The widescreen mode in older Panasonic models typical constisted of adding black bars to the top and bottom of the picture (I believe they called this 'cinema mode'). This will reduce the quality of your video ad you'll need to crop the top and bottom to ensure the video fills the entire screen on a 16:9 tv (otherwise you'll just get an image with a border all around it!).

However, this shouldn't be the case with your model and although the CCD will still produce a 4:3 picture, the pixel aspect ratio will be changed so that all of the resolution is used. You won't get anything 'more' on the picture (i.e you won't get the extra bits to the left and right), but equally you won't lose resolution.

So check the manual and do a manual test before hand. Capture in widescreen and then capture to your PC. when play in media player at full screen, the edges of the video should (almost) touch the edges of your monitor.

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Filming at the YMCA - You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal,
You can do whatever you feel ...

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Hello - thanks for your advice about widescreen - and the YMCA gags!!. I decided not to risk shooting in widescreen mode because I had no time to test the results. Filming went well. 23 takes of the same song! Just used one camera (and a cheap one at that). I would really appreciate your feedback - http://www.mydeo.com/videorequest.as...4235&CID=47495

Robin

Well done you! Great work. From a technical point of view, there should be an option to 'de-interlace' in your output settings. Tick this to get ride of those 'lines' on your video for PC playback.

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Thanks Marc - I used Windows Media Encoder to reduce the size for web streaming. Would it have been better to do it all with the encoder in PPro ?
I really need to buy a new camera - the one I used is not even mine!! I'm hoping to get some kind of Arts Council grant to set myself up proper doing community films.
robin

hello,

i own a canon ZR-500, and you can easily shoot in widescreen or regular view, and i usually pick widescreen because the LCD display is full when shooting in widescreen, and it just looks better to me while shooting, but after i upload the video to my computer, edit, and create an MPEG-4 video,which i then put on youtube, the videos looks a bit shrunk from the left and right(this is one of several videos i made that shows what i mean :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bVoEutOp0). i just wanted to know if it appeared like this because i shot it in widescreen, or could it be caused by youtube altering the video a bit. I just want to know what i need to do to just make it look regular after editing and creating the video. thanks