VSDC offers an easier and a faster way to create black bars. The second way typically involves masking tools – you’ll find these in video guides for Adobe Premiere. First, you can use a widescreen aspect ratio camera for shooting and then convert the result into a standard-width format. Technically, there are two ways to do it. Interestingly, these days some video editing enthusiasts intentionally add black bars to their videos to create the illusion of a letterboxed image.

In the cinema industry, the result is called letterboxing.

Since most movies are shot with a widescreen aspect ratio and watched in standard-width video formats, the image receives black bars automatically in order to preserve the original ratio and prevent quality loss. The reason why black bars (or mattes) are instantly associated with a Hollywood movie is simple. If you’re on Mac, you can recreate most of them in iMovie – it’s also free and available to every Apple user.

To apply these effects, we’ll be using free video editing software for Windows, named VSDC. Some of them are great for intros and teasing trailers, others – can be useful throughout the entire video. In this post, we’ll show you 5 easy post-production tricks you can use in your project. If you have mastered the art of cutting and merging scenes, learned to work with audio and titles on a basic level, it might be time to step up your video editing game and learn a few tricks that will improve the way your movies look on the viewer’s screens.

Vsdc split screen