This Era

This is a simple Letterbox DCTL for the color page in Davinci Resolve that allows you to quickly crop (letterbox/pillarbox) your image to a desired aspect ratio, regardless of the timeline resolution you’ve chosen for your project.

It was inspired by ‘Tims-Letterbox’ by mitkunz. Tim’s DCTL is great, clean and effective, yet I needed a bit more functionality with regards to color and aspect ratios. The THIS ERA Letterbox has presets for all historical cinema standards you could think of, next to a few modern aspect ratios that you’ll likely need.

It’s useful if for instance, you have to output a video file in a specific container like for example 2K DCI Flat for theatrical projection, yet you’re project cinematography was intended for a vastly different aspect ratio.

As a bonus, the separate RGB sliders allow you to choose a color for the letter/pillarboxing. They follow 8-bit color encoding from 0-255, 0 in all channels resulting in black, 255 in all channels resulting in white. This can be very useful if you need them to be a specific color to match for instance, the specific colors in a logo. Simply use a color picker to determine the RGB values in the colors of the media you want to match and copy those into the DCTL values.

Lastly, all sliders can be animated, so you can create some colorful Xavier Dolan type image expansion in your magnum opus.

This instruction and chart for conducting a steadiness test on motion picture cameras was provided by Paul Scaglione, Senior Technician/Designer at Visual Products.

I contacted Paul after reading something in a thread over at cinematography.com. He was kind enough to share his instructions and chart with me and answer a few questions.

I’ve updated the instructions to include what I learned in our correspondence and placed them in a .zip folder along Paul’s chart.