How to create black bars for cinematic look.

Happeler ha scritto il 02.08.2021 ore 13:41

I want to create a cinematic look for my videos before I post them to Youtube. I know that placing black PNG bars over the image is not the best way to do this. I watched a tutorial (not specific to magix) in which a person explained that REAL cinematic boxes should be functional and disappear when the video is playing on a wide screen. To achieve this, he described changing the movie settings in the editor from 1920x1080p to 1920x822, then de-select "keep proportions the same". In this demo, the video instantly had evenly spaced black bars on top and bottom. I tried to replicate this in Magix movie edit pro, but nothing visibly changed in the preview screen, nor when I exported an mp4 sample video.....Can anyone explain the correct way to achieve functional cinematic bars on an HD video thats originally 1920x1080 and will be uploaded to Youtube? Thanks.

Commenti

AAProds ha scritto il 02.08.2021 ore 15:47

@Happeler

Could you post a screenshot or link of a YT video that you want to mimic?

Could you explain what you mean by

REAL cinematic boxes should be functional and disappear when the video is playing on a wide screen.

Do you mean a 16:9 widescreen? If so, your movie (set the Movie settings to match your desired export) simply has to be exported as 1920x820 at 2.34 (ish) aspect and it will play letterboxed (black bars top and bottom) eg VLC Player at maximised screen size.

In YT, my 1920x820 movie plays in a 2.34 frame; there are no black bars. In fact, from what I have seen, the only way you can get black bars nowadays in YT is to put them in the video via an image as you mention, so YT thinks it's video content.

I used the Section effect to crop the top and bottom of my 1920x1080 source using the "Movie Size" button.

When creating your movie settings, set the width and height, then, if those are non-standard, for the aspect ratio, simply insert the actual frame size as such: 1920:820. MEP will calculate the exact ratio for you.

You may also notice that MEP will adjust the export to a valid width: for example, for a width of 1920, it won't accept 822 as a height, only 820. I don't understand why, but it does.