• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Pixel Aspect Ratio Nightmare

  Posted by Ricardo Ellstein on September 21, 2005 at 8:12 pm

  Hi everybody,

  I’ve been struggling with an issue in FCP5 all day today. I hope somebody can help me out.

  I have a DV NTSC timeline in which I’m using both regular DV and HDV. The video looks great but when I render it my video looks “fat”, as if the pixel aspect ratio were off. I tried changing the aspect ratio settings on my sequence as well as on the quicktime export, but no combination will give me the results I want.

  I assume that the following is right:
  3:2 720×480
  DV aspect ratio
  DV NTSC compresion

  The funny thing is that when I import the deformed video back into FCP, the image is perfect. The problem only appears when I open the same file in Quicktime, or a Quicktime based application.

  In my latest test Iimported regular DV to a abrand new project and it gave me the same wierd results, which leads me to believe this isn’t and HDV issue.

  Thaks for the help,

  Ricardo

  Paul Dickin replied 20 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Paul Dickin

  September 22, 2005 at 2:00 pm

  Hi
  That seems to be the way QuickTime Player works – its for playing movies on a computer desktop and has always only understood square pixels.

  Once you have finished editing in a non-square-pixel savvy application like FCP/AE etc and exported a final version then you can use QT Player Pro to resize the play window to give the correct aspect ratio, and Save the movie so it remains this way. To do the resizing, open the Get Movie Properties window, select Video track on the left, and Size on the right, which will show the pixel size of the QT movie.
  Then hold down the Shift key, and resize the player window until it is altered to 640×480 (or whatever you need to give it the correct the aspect ratio).
  Then Save the movie to make it stick this way when opened in all QT-playing applications.

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