I've been making videos that look like the old Edison and Lumiere films from the early 20th century, and I have a rendering question. When I edit my clips, I have several effects that I use (grey scale,grain,ect). Then I use pan and zoom and crop the video to 970 x 720. That gives me 4:3 picture I am looking for. The finished clip looks right (aside from some tweaking of my greyscale settings that I've gotten some advice on. Thanks ttguy.), on a 4:3 tv and even on an old digital projector.
My problem comes when I try to apply a Vignette Effect. I can never get the effect right when I apply it pre-rendering. Kdenlive applies that effect to the whole 16:9 ratio, and it doesn't look right after I render the file. So i leave the vignette effect out and render my file as mpeg 4, and resize it to 970 x 720 which give me a great looking clip. Now to get the vignette effect, I reload the clip, apply the vignette effect. Since it's now working on a 4:3 ratio clip I can get the effect like I want it. When I render it this time I render it the same as before, mpeg 4 resized as 970 x 720. But the finished project looks smaller than before. Is there another way to render this file to keep it the same as before. I chose to render this way to give me a true 4:3 image that is a higher quality than 480P.
I might should have put this question in the effects and transitions forum since it might be easier to fine tune the vignette effect, but any help would be appreciated.
Any suggestions? Thanks

Why do you need to resize the clip the second time?

I resized it again because left alone it would change the 4:3 ratio to 16:9 instead of keeping it 4:3. I noticed in profile management (I think that's what it's called,(I'm not at my editing system right now). There's a tab for custom output settings. If I made my settings for 970 x 720 there, would it always default to these settings when I make changes to my project, without having to resize again to keep my 4:3 ratio?

For the adding of the vignette effect I think you should load your 4:3 ratio video into a 4:3 ratio project. Eg "DV/DVD PAL" or "DV/DVD NTSC".

It should then maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio and then you will not have to resize it. And maybe this will work better.

Thanks again ttguy, will dv/dvd maintain the same quality as as the original. If so, should I be rendering my project as dv/dvd to begin with as opposed to mpeg 4? Sorry to ask so many questions but I'm learning about editing videos from forums like this one. Thanks again.

The difference between what the project properties and what the render options do for your video has never been 100% clear to me.

As I understand it, the project properties define the aspect ratio and the frame rate that kdenlive will expect you to render the project at. But at render time you can overide those options. You can choose to adjust size for example. It is the render stage where you define the quality. You can still choose to render to a H.264 / mp4 format even if you have choosen a DV/DVD project profile. Or you can render to mpeg2. If you choose appropriate quality settings the quality of the rendered video can be the same between these two different codecs. It is just that H.264 will end up a smaller file size for a similar quality mpeg2 rendered bit of footage.

So the project settings really don't decide the quality of the video. It is the render settings.

It advisable however to match the project settings and the source material properties to some degree - especially frame rates. Weird timing issues can ensue if you do not.