16:9 composites

[Angus Mackay]

Hi Richard,

you basicly have two options,

1, work in widescreen mode and “squish” your finished comp for rendering

or

2, work in annamorphic (squished) mode from the start.

some people prefer to do the later, personally I prefer the former as it’s easier to get an accurate picture of your composition.

check out Rick Gerards excelent tutorial “Dr Strangepixel” you’ll find out all you need to know there,

https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?forumid=2&page=/articles/gerard_rick/pixel_madness/index.html

if you need anthing explained just post your Q back on here. Also If your looking for specific comp sizes etc make sure you state whether your working in NTSC or PAL

HTH

Angus

[Filip Vandueren]

If you nmean by letterboxed, rendering to a movie that allready has the black bars, the answer is most definitly no!

For DVD you should always render out anamorphic material (squished as you say)

As Angus points out you have two options for creating the comps.

[Matthew Daday]

Make your comp size 864X486. This is a square pixel environment for widescreen. Work as you normally would. What you see here is what it will look like when you see it on the 16X9 plasma. When it comes time to render your work, in the output module choose to render with a stretch, and “squish” it to 720X486 (This is a preset size in the dropdown menu). Some people like to put the 864X486 comp into a new comp that is 720X486 and non-uniform scale it to fit. That works too, then just render it.
Matt

[Ronald]

just wondering, do you put the 864×486 square pixel comp into a 720×486 square pixel or a .9 pixel render comp for your final render?

[Filip Vandueren]

If you drop the comp in a square pixel 720×486, and then hit Command-Option-F to scale it to fit to comp size, you get the stretched output.

But if you drop it into a comp that has the right pixel aspect ratio (BTW for ntsc widescreen that’s 0,8333, not 0.9) After effects will scale it automatically to compensate for the difference.

the resulting rendered pixels will be the same, however, if you open up the non-square comp you have some extra-features like Pixel Aspect Correction for displaying in the correct aspect.

[Steve Roberts]

Are you sure about the PAR for NTSC widescreen? I thought it was 1.2, and that for NTSC standard it was 10/11 or .91.

Steve

[Filip Vandueren]

Oh,

Sorry ’bout that 8-/

0.8333 ^-1 = 1.2

so the pixels are squished 83.33 % and get unsquished at 120 % to “become” widescreen

[Steve Roberts]

Ah — of course. 🙂

Thanks,
Steve