0.9 footage looks like widescreen

[Blast1]

[jskehanpro] “project set to NTSC 720×480 4:3 (0.9) and the 3 first cams look normal, but I’m looking at one cameras footage and it looks like its a 1.2 (widescreen) ratio,”
Is it 4:3 with vertical stretch?

[jskehanpro] “I go to properties to check, but it says its 0.9…”
Do you know if there was a anamorphic lens on the camcorder.

[Josh Skehan]

Thanks a bunch! Never heard of a 4:3 with vertical stretch without the footage looking majorly squeezed, how do you tell? Don’t think there was an anamorphic lens, but I’m going to have to assume one of my guys did so. Is it possible to convert all my 4:3 footage to 16:9 and work it that way? Also, is it too cheesy to go from a 4:3 shot to a 16:9 shot in a video?

[Josh Skehan]

yup, anamorphic lens on 4:3 footage is the problem. shucks

[Blast1]

When you capture Anamorphic video the camera is set to normal 4:3 so there is no widescreen bit, to fix this, when the footage is in the bin, clik on it to select it, then open the file menu, select interpret footage and change the pixel aspect ratio to the proper one for your video format like 1.2 for DV NTSC.
I usually use Widescreen anamorphic lens on my projects for B-roll to mix with various flavors of HD, I use Scenalyzer to capture with as I can do two or three captures at once, and if the Scenalyzer capture is set to 16:9 it adds the WS bit to the footage.

[Josh Skehan]

good feedback! well when I interpret the anamorphic 4:3 footage to 1.2 it’s very stretched. I also tried every other ratio as well and it didn’t work. Now, my footage from the other 3 cams, which is true 4:3, I converted that to widescreen and it somewhat worked, but then I was missing the black bars on top and bottom. Yet, I can scale it down a bit and get somewhat the look of the 4:3 anamorphed. Would this method be recognized by the average viewer/acceptable?