• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Why 640×480???

  Posted by John Stanowski on July 20, 2008 at 4:17 am

  Newbie question here.
  I heard that non-square pixel aspect ratios don’t work well with C4D and After Effects Exchange. So the guy in the tutorial used a setting of 640×480 NTSC. Why? What is that? What does 640×480 have to do with NTSC?

  I’ve also seen video clips that were at that size. Could someone please tell me the signifigance of 640×480 other than it being an old monitor size?

  Does it somehow stretch to 720×480/6 when you change the aspect ratio?

  Please help.

  John Stanowski replied 17 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Brian Jones

  July 21, 2008 at 9:34 pm

  History. 640×480 is the VGA standard which is the same size as the evolved later standard of NTSC of 720×480. It ends up as 4:3 aspect ratio both ways because 640×480 really is 4:3 on a computer monitor with square pixels (ignoring wide screen monitors) it stays 4:3. 720×480 is not mathematically 4:3 but it ends up 4:3 on a CRT TV since the pixels are non-square (slightly taller than wide). LCD TV’s will blow this out of the water, of course.
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  John Stanowski

  July 21, 2008 at 9:58 pm

  Awesome, thanks! I suspected that but the pixel aspect ratio confused me. So, if I render a 640×480 animation out of C4D using the After Effects Exchange, I can open it in AE and change the comp to 720×480, and change the pixel aspect ratio to .9 and all will be well? I’ll have to do some experiments on this.

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