One of my earlier creations from 2005, with a very simple premise.  Andy’s Letterbox is a cinema style widescreen matte generator that users can place over their 4:3 videos to give them that widescreen look.

I wrote this one to simplify my own life.  Cutting promo’s in Asia, where so much of the source material available comes from dirty masters, we often needed to blow out those subtitles, graphic elements etc to create cleaner sharper looking spots.  Blow things up past 120% and they start to look really really nasty.  So one way around the problem is to overlay a letterbox element over the whole piece. It reduces the viewable area, and gives more scope for reframing the underlying video track (to best hide what we don’t want to be seen) without having to blow up the picture to hopelessly pixelated proportions.

So we agree that the concept of placing a widescreen matte on 4:3 broadcast footage has its place? Good. But Apple’s Widescreen filter is such a dog. Bad.  Needing to be applied to every clip, and even then having only limited flexibility for reframing, its not even close to what we need.  The simple solution is to create your own mask by adding a couple of cropped slug tracks to the timeline, or maybe a single slug track with an appropriate Mask Shape filter applied to it ...

... actually the even simpler solution was to create a single generator plugin that did that whole masked slug thing all in one go, and this is it!

Here for your delight and delectation are a few size settings to get you going:

    In a 4:3 timeline

            19 = 1.66:1 (35 mm European widescreen standard, also Super 16 mm)

            21 = 1.70:1 (VistaVision)

            25 = 1.78:1 (video widescreen standard 16:9)

            27 = 1.85:1 (35 mm US and UK widescreen standard / HDTV Standard)

            43 = 2.35:1 (35 mm anamorphic)

            47 = 2.55:1 (CinemaScope)

            55 = 3.00:1 (Cinerama)

What?  There’s more? No not really ... but prompted by a hack of my first version by Apple Discussions forum buddy Patrick Sheffield, I did later update the plugin so that it would also produce a variable “pillarbox” matte for those ever increasing number of users working natively in 16:9 and maybe needing to format their projects for 4:3 or 14:9 center cut output.

    In a 16:9 timeline

           -12 = 1.55:1 (video standard 14:9)

           -25 = 1.33:1 (video standard 4:3)

         

The future: Well, perhaps a further update is required to allow you to adjust opacity?  But you can easily use the letterbox’s opacity level directly in the timeline to do that.  I guess I could add in an image well, where you could drop in a still to use as the letterbox fill ...but then you could just stick that still (or clip) on the track above, change it’s composite mode to Track Matte - Alpha and so achieve the same thing.  Still, the whole point is to simplify so perhaps I will update it again one of these days.