Aspect ratio issue

[Kevin Camp]

[Ruadhri Brennan] “a media player such as vlc player will play it automatically as widescreen without me having to go to the video settings and changing the aspect ratio from there.”

not all players will handle non-square pixels correctly, though i thought that vlc did. you can make sure that you have the latest version of the player – though since you can manually tell it how to compensate for widescreen par, i assume that’s not the problem.

another problem can be that not all codecs contain the pixel aspect ratio in their data, so if the player doesn’t see that info in the codec, then it just assumes it is square until you tell it otherwise.

if a codec will maintain the par data, then that would be set in the render settings.

[Ruadhri Brennan] ” I’ve checked the composition settings to make sure that it’s set at D1/DV Pal Widescreen (720×576), I’ve even rendered it with square pixel checked in the comp settings but to no avail.”

you wouldn’t want to do it that way, 720×576 is a non-square frame size, so setting that to a square par would never help.

you would need to set the par settings in the render settings to match the comp’s or, you could try is dropping the non-square comp into a square pixel comp preset, like the pal widescreen square pixel preset, then render that as square pixel (since it is now square).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Dan Browne]

I’d just calculate what that ratio is in square pixels. For web 16×9 stuff I usually use 640×360 with square pixels.

Dan Browne
Hawkes Bay, New Zealand
http://www.indelible.co.nz