[MacDV] 16:9 and 4:3 in same project

[Brett Conlon]

Hiya,

Anyone have advice on the best way to deal with having both 16:9 and 4:3 
footage in the same DVDSPro project?

I'm kinda in limbo between the 4:3 and 16:9 format. My camera supports 
16:9 and I've been shooting my most recent footage in 16:9 but my initial 
footage was 4:3.

The current project holds mostly 4:3 but the last segment is 16:9. For 
this project I'll keep it primarily as a 4:3 disc. Even though we have 4:3 
TV's in the family my goal next is to prepare for the future and create 
all 16:9 projects. I'm guessing that the next TV we get will be 
widescreen.

For this project I've captured the footage in FCExpress and have made sure 
that the ratios in the sequences are correct. The 4:3 and 16:9 sequences 
were then saved separately. I've imported them into DVDSPro and set their 
tracks to their respective ratios.

If I set the 16:9 track in DVDSP to Letterbox and then set the 4:3 track 
to "end run" to the 16:9 track and the user chooses "Play all video" in my 
main menu should the 4:3 footage all of a sudden change to letterbox when 
it changes track? If so that's fine with me. I'll also be setting up menus 
to choose these segments independently.

For my next project (all 16:9) I'm yet to get my head around preparing 
menus in both 4:3 and 16:9 so it will play correctly on the different 
format TV's.

But I'm having a blast working with all this stuff. It sure blows my mind 
trying to learn it after 9pm when the kids have been put orff to bed.

Cheers to all,

Cojcolds