any thoughts about mixing 4:3 & widescreen, HD & non-HD?

[seasons]

When I started editing together footage from different titles a few years ago (not extensively, but everyone has to start somewhere), the biggest issue I faced was how to combine footage from 4:3 titles with footage from 16:9 titles. It wasn't always pretty, but I'd definitely rather crop my widescreen footage down to 4:3 -- even if it meant destroying the composition of a shot, in some cases -- than to try to upscale my older 4:3 footage to fill a widescreen-shaped frame. That always looked terrible and it seems like the gospel rule of AMV editing around here was NEVER UPSCALE FOOTAGE so I wasn't about to try anything that would probably put off potential viewers, and for good reason, too.

Fast forward a few years and everything is widescreen now. I realize that for editors who exclusively work with new titles or just prefer the look of widescreen clips, this isn't a new phenomenon at all. Heck, you've probably been doing it since 2007 or something. Same goes for editing with HD footage. Seems like just yesterday that there was an arms race between editors to put up the highest-quality AMVs, and everyone would make sure to let everyone know that this AMV they're about to watch was not 848x480, but 1280x720. Or even 1920x1080 (and if your computer can't play it smoothly, too bad!). It seems like people don't make such a big deal about high-definition AMVs anymore, but only because that's what most people have come to expect these days.

This brings me back to where I started. I love a lot of titles from the 90s and early 00s. So do you, I hope. Anyway, I just want to know what you do when you're working on an AMV containing clips from many different titles. Specifically:
-standard (4:3) DVD footage (640x480)
-widescreen (16:9) DVD footage (848x480)
-widescreen HD/blu-ray footage (1280x720, etc)

How do you bring all this together without it looking like a mess? I know that everything could be downscaled to fit into the frame of the 4:3 sources, but you'd be sacrificing all the beauty of the higher-quality footage and I wonder if viewers would actually be more offended by that than watching 4:3 footage that's drastically upscaled. These are weird times we're living in.

I learned everything I know from the guides but they were written long before this conundrum ever existed.

[BasharOfTheAges]

I haven't worked on my own projects with SD stuff for a while, but I often have to prep it for my EIE events. In such cases, I've been running through a series of upscale and filtering scripts that aim for 4:3 720p that they can pan around how they see fit. My main editing rig isn't that beefy by today's standards (Phenom II x4 965, 8GB RAM, RAID 0 HDD array, etc.) and it takes a good 20 minutes to run for every minute of footage I'm converting.

[CrackTheSky]

The few times I've mixed 16:9 with 4:3, I've always ended up cropping the 16:9 down to 4:3. It doesn't look good, but I can't tell if that's because I know the 16:9 footage should be 16:9, and so when I see those scenes in the AMV it's not what I'm used to and so it looks odd to me, or if there's genuinely something compositionally "off" that makes it look objectively wrong.

My personal preference? I'm not too picky about it. I'm not a quality Nazi though so I may not be the best person to comment on this. I've been watching a lot of older videos lately, and every so often I'll come across a video that mixes 16:9 with 4:3 and doesn't even bother to standardize the AR, so that you get the letterboxes on the 16:9 footage. I'm surprised how little it bothers me; I'm probably an anomaly though. If I had to choose, I'd say you're probably better off upscaling and cropping to make the 4:3 into 16:9. We live in an era where AviSynth is more powerful than ever and cleaning up upscaled footage is easier and more effective than it's ever been. Besides, if you're working with SD, the question of quality is probably going to be mostly moot, unless it's particularly bad.

As for mixing HD with SD...I wouldn't, unless your video's concept calls for it and can't be done any other way. In fact I think in these cases it would be better to downscale the HD footage to match the SD footage, rather than upscale the SD stuff. Upscaling as I mentioned in the paragraph above, within an SD framework, is one thing, but I think if you start pushing it into HD resolutions you reach a point of diminishing returns, and it'll probably start to look...not good. This is all hypothetical though, not from personal experience, so take what I say with a huge grain of salt.

[Radical_Yue]

When it comes to ARs, whatever you have more of

More 4:3 than 16:9? Go with 4:3.
More 16:9 than 4:3? Go with 16:9.
Basically, whatever leads to the less amount of sacrifices to the cropping god. A lot of the kids nowadays (get off my lawn, ya youngins!) go with 16:9 over everything since 4:3 looks weird to them but if I'm using one 16:9 source in a video of 4:3 I'm not going to cut off tons of heads and torsos just to make sure it fills the youtube box.

And of course, never upscale an old DVD source to HD, even if the majority of sources you have are HD. Taking a source that already looks iffy at it's native res and blowing it up is a horrible idea. I always say that your video only looks as good as it's fugliest source

In your example of the 4:3, 16:9, and 16:9HD, from the sounds of it 848x480 16:9 would be the best way to go. Seems like you've got a lot of 16:9 but obviously not everything is HD. Keep is smaller to save quality and go 16:9 to better suit the majority of footage. HD still looks really nice scaled down, it just doesn't fill your screen with it's niceness which is a sacrifice you have to be willing to make if you're making the conscious decision to have a mix like that. There are more than enough shows and remasters where you could avoid the older stuff but I know not everyone is going to do that due to the lurve for it. If you truly lurve it then you will be willing to make the sacrifice.

[Cirera]

I agree with Radical_Yue, whatever you have more of, go with that. I don't mind if people mix the aspect ratios, what I do mind is if the resolution jumps between widescreen and fullscreen. That stuff just looks bad and unprofessional. But if you fix them all to look the same in the end, (it does take a small sacrifice in the quality as everyone knows) I don't mind one bit.
But basically editors who use different video sources that aren't the same resolution, and the video keeps jumping between sizes with black edges everywhere... jeesh. *shudders*

[Qyot27]

Although I've never been in a position to mix SD and HD footage (the few times I've done videos in HD it's been from a singular source that removes the question or at least fits on the canvas), and most times I've found myself needing to mix ARs, it's been majority-preferential (at least insofar as those videos I made after I started caring about preserving proper AR). There is one exception to cropping, when I was using RahXephon - the letterboxed segments remained letterboxed and the TV footage was left native, but I kept the widescreen footage concentrated in a single section and set up transitions that grew and shrank on either side so it wasn't a sudden jump in AR. More in the vein of, "well, I can't be subtle about this, so let's be really obvious."

[Shui]

I just use 720x480 with a par of 1:1.
That makes it an AR of 3:2 which is kinda something in between. Then I simply adjust with each scene what I want. You might end up scaling everything up but hey it doesn't look too shabby.

[Shui]

I just use 720x480 with a par of 1:1.
That makes it an AR of 3:2 which is kinda something in between. Then I simply adjust with each scene what I want. You might end up scaling everything up but hey it doesn't look too shabby.

I did this on a whim, I'm sure you could mathematically find out at which AR you needn't scale up too much for both 16:9 and 4:3 footage.