Comp Aspect Ratio Render

[Steve Roberts]

My guess is that the Win & QT Players can’t recognize non-square pixels. Premiere and AE can recognize the non-square pixels, so they display the movie properly.

If you really want WinMP/QT to play the movie at 16:9 you need to make a movie at 16:9 with square pixels:

160×90
320×180
… and so on up to 864×486 (for NTSC, anyway)

Steve

[Filip Vandueren]

What is your delivery medium ?

If you’re going for a 16:9 DVD or going to tape but playing back on a 16:9 screen, this is exactly what you want:
you’re using the full resolution of the recording medium, and leaving the stretching to the last step (in the TV or DVD-player)

If you’re delivering to the web or CD-rom, you should always use square pixels: so 16:9 would be 1024*576 px.

Alternatively, instead of re-rendering you can manually set the size of a movie in Quicktime player and save those settings back into the file.
If you have QT Pro v7, you can enter the 1024*576 dimensions in the Movie Properties window so it stretches to the right dimensions.
You can also try doing it by hand by holding shift while resizing your window. Open the Info Window to see the current size in pixels.
Holding Shift ignores the aspect ratio (5:4 for 720*576).

BTW if you want to view true 4:3, you should resize a 720*576 D1 Pal movie to 768*576

[Rusty Brown]

Thanks for that.

I’m still not sure why in AE the comp appears as 4:3 even when set to widescreen 16:9 with non-square pixels….? Is AE not able to display compositions in anything other than 4:3?

[Filip Vandueren]

You can always enable pixel aspect ratio correction, that way AE crudely stretches the pixels untill they look square; so it stretches a 720*576 D1 widecsreen to 1024*576; but only for display-purposes.
The resulting render will still be 720*576 and the preview does some nasty jaggies (like nearest neighbour scaling in photoshop)