Getting Letterboxed Effect When Exporting

Question

Hi Everyone-

This is my first post ever on here, so if I am doing something wrong, please let me know.

So I am new to Premiere, have done a bunch of tutorials and was recently putting together a sizzle for a friend. When I export my sequence, I cannot figure out why I am getting a letterboxed effect when my sources are not letterboxed. My video sources consist of a variety of formats, such as the following: 1920x1080, 960x540, and 640x360. I have also attached pics of the letterboxed image (top) and the source (bottom) as reference.

FWIW, I have Default Media Scaling set to None under Preferences/Media. I am not sure if this is why this is happening. Or is this an export settings issue? Anyways, I'm pretty lost, so thanks in advance for any help or advice!

Phillip Harvey · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. Based on your last paragraph - if you look at my screen grabs above of my sequence and export settings, I feel like they match, don't they? Again, I am new to Premiere, so maybe I am wrong.

I think what it comes down to is, whenever I begin a new project next, to follow exactly what you said. But for now, I'd love your advice re: whether these settings and if they appear to match.

Thanks!

In that last photo your Sequence and your Export settings match, yes. But the media inside the sequence (variable 1) does not. The media is obviously quite small - or already scaled down. Scale it up to fit the frame size of 1920x1080.

Here is a little graphic to convey the idea better when working with variable media:

You can add any sized media in the sequence. Big, small, widescreen, square, whatever... it isn't all going to fit perfectly. Some things you'll need to scale up, some things you'll need to scale down, some things you'll need to crop the left and right, or the top and bottom.

The only way to not do any of that - and generally speaking your ideal Recording>Editing>Output situation is when they all match (or if your source media is larger than the sequence/output):

Andy 1968 · Answer

I am not 100% sure what you are doing. That being said if you drop a 640 X 480 video into a 1080 sequence it will be letter boxed by defualt. You have to scale it up by 200% or more but hair might look like rabbit fur instead of hair. If you start watching the video below at 6:30 you will see what I mean.

https://youtu.be/dVLUxRkPMdA

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