Aspect ratios

Adobe Premiere Pro

Aspect ratios

Posted by James Goldsbury on April 14, 2012 at 1:46 pm

Hi all,

I’ve an issue that’s melting my brain and could do with some advice.

I took some footage on a panasonic dv cam in widescreen aspect ratio.
I dump it onto the pc and if i look at the properties it says that the aspect ratio is 720×576. Yet to view it, the footage is clearly in widescreen ie 1024×576. I put it into PPro and again it ‘looks’ like perfectly normal widscreen when on the timeline but the clip properties says 720×576.

I edit and export the footage using ‘match sequence settings’ which exports it again to what appears visually as widescreen(but still the file properties still say 720×576). However, when I upload it to vimeo/youtube it will be squashed along the x-axis. What is going on? And is there a way to change the export ‘aspect ratio’ in PPro to 1024×576 so that it definitely, positively is widescreen?

thanks

J

Walter Soyka replied 14 years, 4 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Ron Pestes
April 14, 2012 at 5:48 pm

There is a preset in AME for wide screen Vimeo or Youtube that should take care of it.

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Tom Daigon
April 14, 2012 at 6:30 pm

I will be camping out there most of Monday and will try to be there Tuesday since I would like to be a part of the meet and greet.

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Walter Soyka
April 15, 2012 at 5:28 am

[james goldsbury] “I took some footage on a panasonic dv cam in widescreen aspect ratio.
I dump it onto the pc and if i look at the properties it says that the aspect ratio is 720×576. Yet to view it, the footage is clearly in widescreen ie 1024×576. I put it into PPro and again it ‘looks’ like perfectly normal widscreen when on the timeline but the clip properties says 720×576.”

All standard definition PAL videos must be 720×576. The signal itself cannot be encoded any other way. But let’s look at the numbers for a moment: a TV may be 4:3 or 16:9, but 720×576 is 5:4. How can that be?

The answer is that the pixels are not square. For 4:3 PAL, they are 1.09 times wider than they are tall. For 16:9 PAL, they are 1.46 times wider than they are tall.

There are two aspect ratios you need to consider: the display aspect ratio (DAR) of 4:3 or 16:9, and the pixel aspect ratio (or PAR), which indicates how much the pixels much be stretched or squished to fill the display.

To output for computers (which typically expect square pixels), you must use a square pixel preset as Ron suggested.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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