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aspect ratio conversion problem
Hello to all,
I have been given some footage from an HVX 200 shot in HD 720 60p. I’m using Raylight to edit the footage. I was asked to down-convert it to NTSC widescreen for DVD, but I’m having an aspect ratio conversion issue.First, if I understand correctly, the HVX shoots 720 in 1.333 aspect ratio. The first time I tried to process it, I set up the project as a standard NTSC widescreen (1.212 aspect) project, imported the footage, and let Vegas do its thing. It looked great on the preview monitor, but when I played it back in Quicktime and Windows Media Player, everything went downhill. I guess the female subjects will be happy they look so thin…
I then tried to set up the project as 1280×720, used every aspect ratio available, and tried to render it as ntsc ws. Also no dice.
I have since tried every combination of project settings and render options that I can think of, but it always comes out badly, but with one exception. When I rendered it to 856×480 square pixel with the Cineform HD codec, it did have the correct aspect ratio upon playback. That leads me to question the 720 HD 1.33 ratio that I originally assumed to be true. But that doesn’t solve my issue if it needs to go to ntsc ws for dvd production.
With the wealth of knowledge and experience in the forum, I’m sure that someone will know what I need to do. Thanks much in advance.
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4 Replies
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I have just learned something that may make this simpler (or not). The Firestore/Raylight plugin system converts everything to square pixels. That’s why the 856×480 worked.
So my question is now this: how do I go from a square-pixel 720p source to NTSC widescreen without squishing it?
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> First, if I understand correctly, the HVX shoots 720 in 1.333 aspect ratio.
That’s incorrect. 720p uses square pixels. 720 / 9 = 80 and 80 * 16 = 1280, therefore 1280×720 is 16×9 square pixels.
> The first time I tried to process it, I set up the project as a standard NTSC widescreen (1.212 aspect) project, imported the footage, and let Vegas do its thing. It looked great on the preview monitor, but when I played it back in Quicktime and Windows Media Player, everything went downhill. I guess the female subjects will be happy they look so thin…
You did this correctly. Quicktime is brain dead. It has no concept of non-square pixels and so it ignores the PAR in the video header and displays everything as square pixels. Windows Media Player isn’t much better. Media Players are poor for judging aspect for this reason. They assume square pixels because PC’s use square pixels.
> But that doesn’t solve my issue if it needs to go to ntsc ws for dvd production.
DVD must be MPEG-2. Just render the 720p footage to DVD Widescreen MPEG-2 and burn a DVD and watch it on a widescreen TV and it will be fine.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Hi
You keep mentioning NTSC? Was that original footage PAL? If so that may also be the cause of your prolems.Allen
ASX Media Group, Inc.
http://www.asxvideo.com
NEW DVD – Europe, Trains-n-Trams -
thank you all for the help. I didn’t know that media players often skip the pixel aspct ratio in the header, but it does make sense, since computers love square pixels.
I’ve got it now, and it looks great on a tv. Best wishes to you both.
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