Exporting 16:9 ratio from Premiere Pro always warped in Quicktime and VLC

[Jeff Pulera]

I’mm going to assume you are working with NTSC video, or “widescreen DV”. Whether shooting 4:3 or 16:9, the frame size is always 720×480 pixels, but the Pixel Aspect Ratio changes from 0.9 to 1.2 to get the widescreen look using rectangular pixels. This type of “stretched” 16:9 video is known as “anamorphic” widescreen.

Media players unfortunately assume a PAR of 1.0, or square pixels, which is why the resulting file doesn’t look right.

So, when encoding for the web, you need to manually change the image size and pixel aspect in the encoder settings so the resulting video clip will look proper in the player.

Depending on where you look, I’ve seen the settings as 854×480 or 864×480, and specify a PAR of 1.0, and the resulting file will have the proper 16:9 aspect in the player then.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Nrsingha Caitanya dasa]

Thank you so much for the help. As much as I could understand, I tried to implement your advice and so far the result seems good. Really I am grateful.

At any rate if you have a chance to answer a few more of my questions that would be all the more helpful.
So what I have done so far is, when I get to the Premiere’s export window I leave the ‘Format’ on Quicktime and I put the ‘Preset’ on custom. As far as I can tell ‘custom’ is the only setting that will allow me adjust the settings down in the ‘video’ panel (i.e the width & height , Aspect, etc). And I believe that this is necessary to make the adjustments that you advised, is this correct? At any rate, then I tried putting the measurements at 854×480 and the Aspect ratio at 1.0 sq pxls, like you suggested. And I was pleased to see that it came out looking correct and played in the older quicktime w/o issue.

Anyway I should also mention that I put the ‘Codec’ to none because I am assuming/guessing this is the equivalent to Final Cuts export>Quicktime Movie (i.e uncompressed), as opposed to export>Quicktime conversion.

Now I guess just two questions remain. One is that this particular exported video could not play in VLC. VLC said ” VLC does not support the audio or video format “twos”. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do”. So seeing as how previous exports worked in VLC, although warped, I can understand that somewhere along the lines some of the settings I adjusted created this problem. What settings can I use that will allow me to export for VLC and keep the proper aspect ratio?

Also my last question is simple, how do I export an uncompressed video of my sequence with Adobes settings? As mentioned above, I think I am doing that by setting the ‘codec’ to ‘none’, but is this correct? And also is it possible that this is what is incompatible with VLC?

THank you so much for the help, and to everyone who has taken the time to go through my post.

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi,

You should be able to choose an existing preset and modify the settings. Look for a little chain link icon next to frame size numbers, you have to deselect that to be able to modify the numbers individually.

I don’t use VLC, nor do I use QuickTime much since I edit on the PC. I actually use H.264 usually instead of QT, and these files play in iTunes and such just fine, and I believe the file extension is .mp4 on those clips.

Personally, I have never used “uncompressed” for a video export. If the source video was already compressed (and all cameras compress the video), I don’t see an advantage to going uncompressed. Most output formats, with a high enough data rate, will look excellent. So, I’m not sure on what the settings should be, I’m not at my edit station right now to look at the options available.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers