Letterboxer
The Letterboxer plug-in is the simplest of all the Magic Bullet Frames tools. It allows you to crop your final output to any aspect ratio you desire.
The Letterboxer controls in After Effects
Letterboxer works in one of two ways, either applied directly to a Video Layer or on a solid layer at the top of your comp. If you apply Letterboxer to the actual layer you want to crop, you should select On Image (the default) from the Render pop-up menu. If you wish to add a Letterboxing layer to your comp, create a new comp-sized Solid Layer and apply Letterboxer to this layer. The default Render option of On Transparent is what you want in this case.
The Color control lets you select the color of your letterbox “bars.”
The Preset menu contains a list of common aspect ratios. You can select one from this list, or dial your own using the Aspect Ratio slider. The preset aspect ratios are as follows:
4:3 (Academy) The aspect ratio of your TV (probably) and of uncropped 35mm film. Letterboxer works in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions, so you can use this preset to crop the sides of your widescreen image to show an Academy “center crop.”
Academy Standard is the term used for films that were shot before the 1950s when the standard aspect ratio for the film was 4:3. It was formally adopted as a standard by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1932. Most classic films were shot and conformed to 4:3 aspect ratio. It is no coincidence that the first televisions used this format as well.
1.66:1 (Super 16) This is the aspect ratio of Super 16, a film format that shoots onto the entire 16mm negative, including the part usually reserved for a magnetic soundtrack. This is also the aspect ratio of VistaVision, a format derived by running 35mm film sideways through a camera, in much the same way that film threads through a 35mm still camera.
16:9 (Widescreen TV) The widescreen format that’s acceptable to consumers, convenient for engineers, and dissimilar to any previously established media aspect ratio. Who wouldn’t love it?
Original DV (left/top) and Letterboxer (right/bottom) results using the 16:9 or 1.85:1 option
1.85:1 (Theatrical) Most films projected in theaters are cropped to this aspect ratio. You may hear it referred to as “flat,” since it’s a widescreen format that involves no distorting of the recorded image.
2.35:1 (Anamorphic) The other common cinema aspect ratio, formerly known as Cinemascope and now often referred to as simply ‘scope. This is the projection aspect ratio of 35mm film shot with an anamorphic lens, which squeezes the image horizontally to use the entire area of standard Academy frame to contain a widescreen image.
2.76:1 (Ultra) What happens when you stick an anamorphic lens on an already widescreen format such as 65mm? You get some crazy-wide images on such films as Ben Hur and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. These films are so wide that you rarely see them at their original aspect ratios, but if you did, this is what you’d see.
Letterboxer is fairly cool. Well, OK, maybe not, but there are a couple of things about it that are kind of nifty and should save you time. The first one is that it is pixel-aspect aware. Using the amazing ability of modern computers to do math, Letterboxer does the right thing no matter what your comp’s pixel aspect is. The other is that no matter what setting you choose for Aspect Ratio, the boundary between the letterbox “bars” and the image is always clean and sharp, not soft and anti-aliased. (To effect this, Letterboxer internally runs a full emulation of MacPaint.)
The values you enter for Aspect Ratio are the left half of the common method of denoting aspect ratios, i.e. you enter 1.85 for a 1.85:1 crop, and 2.35 for a 2.35:1. But if you wanted to enter Aspect Ratio values that don’t have a “1” on the right side of the colon, you can take advantage of After Effects’ ability to do simple calculations in numeric fields. For instance, for a 16:9 aspect, simply type 16/9 into the Aspect Ratio field and After Effects will convert that to 1.7778.