If you have a Premiere project and want to include anamorphic 16x9 widescreen footage in a 4x3 standard project, automatically adding "letterbox", you can do this easily in Premiere 6.5. Here are the steps you need to follow. I assume you know the basics of working with Premiere. Because of bugs and limitations of older versions of Premiere, you must have at least version 6.5 for this to work correctly. Note that Premiere Pro handles clips a bit differently. In Premiere Pro, all clips maintain their aspect ratio when the scale setting in the motion settings are set to "uniform scale".

1) Start with a standard 4x3 project in Premiere 6.5.

2) Import you footage into your project. Note that the pixel aspect ratio will be displayed beside the image size. Below, Premiere thinks that both are standard DV clips (still images in this case). The "WidesceenNTSCDV.psd" clip needs to be changed so that Premiere knows that it is a widescreen clip. Note that the preview in the top of the window, the square and circle are note quite square and circular.

3) Select the clip you want to change in the project window and select the menu option "Clip -> Advanced Options -> Pixel Aspect ratio..."

4) Set the pixel aspect ratio to the correct aspect ratio. In this case, it should be "D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2)"

5) Notice that after the change, the aspect ratio now shows "1.2". Also, the preview now shows a more correct display of the clip. Now drag the clip to your timeline. To have Premiere automatically add the letterbox, you need to turn on the "maintain aspect ratio" option for all the clips that do not match the aspect ratio of the project. In this case, the widescreen clip. Right click the clip on the timeline, and select "Video Options -> Maintain Aspect Ratio"

6) The clip should now show the letterbox.

7) The standard clip does not have the letterbox.

A few notes to keep in mind:

Premiere is resizing the 16x9 footage to 4x3 by dropping some of the horizontal lines of the clip. If your clip is interlaced video, this can cause some artifacts when being displayed on a standard TV. You may have to try playing with the flicker removal and deinterlace options. Try working with a small piece of you video that shows the problem and make note what works the best.

Some files include a flag that tells Premiere what the pixel aspect of the footage is. Premiere may or may not be able to read this flag. In the case of the stills I used for the project here, I used Photoshop CS and its new pixel aspect feature. Premiere 6.5 was released before it knew that Photoshop supported it, so it tried to guess what the pixel aspect was. The file is 720x480 pixels, so it assumed it was a standard DV pixel aspect clip. Premiere Pro will recognize the flag in Photoshop CS files.

The full project files and this document can be downloaded here -- Premiere6.5_16x9_in_4x3.zip

Let me know if you have and questions or comments -- jeremy@jeremymoore.com