Exporting HD settings? Appears 4.3?

[Kevin Camp]

1440×1080 is a 4:3 ratio, but when it has a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio it becomes 16:9.

this is similar to sd… a 4:3 sd frame is 720×486 which is a 3:2 ratio, but with 0.9 pixel aspect ratio it becomes 4:3. same for a 16:9 sd frame, it is actually 720×486 too, but with a 1.2 par which makes it 16:9.

so what you are seeing is usually normal, if you were to take that render into an nle or back in to ae, it should use the par correction to make the frame 16:9.

if your destination is for a computer screen which only uses square pixels, you are at the mercy of the player which may or may not use par correction to correctly display the clip. if this is the case, you can work in after effects using a square pixel comp. for 1080, make the comp size 1920×1080 with square pixels. any 1440×1080 clips that get add should be correctly compensated for and expanded automatically by ae to fill the frame. then you can render this out normally.

as far as your audio problems, it sounds like you are ‘exporting’ from ae, rather than rendering via the render queue. you should normally use the render queue (composition>add to render queue) to get better control (more options) when you render. if you use the render queue, you’ll just click on the render settings then check the audio option at the bottom of that window and set the audio settings accordingly.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Danny Winn]

Oh my gosh Kevin that helps so much, and yes I was using the render queue, I guess I was thinking of the term used in Premiere Pro, but of course I did mean render queue.

I will try again tonight and thanks to both of you for responding.

I’m a wiz at SD but HD is a different monster. I’ll get it…

[Danny Winn]

Hey Kevin,

One more problem. It appears to play in slo mo now even though the size is right now and I do have sound. any idea why it apears slo mo?

Thanks Again

[Kevin Camp]

you’d have to check the frame rates…

go to your ae project, select the footage in the project window and it should say the frame rate of that clip at the top of the project panel. if that is the correct frame rate, double check the the comp has the same frame rate.

if the comp is correct, check the rendered file and make sure it has the same frame rate (if needed, bring the render back into ae and check the frame rate).

if they are all correct, then try putting the render in to a new comp and doing a ram preview (zero on the numbers pad)… if the render plays back ok, then it may be that playback is slow when reading off the hard drive. you could try rendering to a compressed file to lighten the data rate.

if you had been rendering to lossless or uncompressed, try a quicktime, but click the format options in the output module settings and choose photo-jpeg with a quality setting around 75. this should lighten up your file’s data rate quite a bit but still maintain good image quality.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Danny Winn]

Wow you are good Kevin.

Yeah the one that appeared slo mo played fine back in AE, I had tried to play it in Windows media player originally but it did look slo mo in that.

I don’t really get that cause I have 6g of ram and a 2.6 Pentium duel core processer, all brand new for this HD cam.

I always use avi to edit and output to final.

Most of my HD stuff will be used for TV ads and some online.

Thanks so much again Kevin, it’s nice to get good info without being talked down to. Like I said, I never had problems working with SD, but HD will take some learning.

Hope to get advise from you in the future.

-Danny

[Kevin Camp]

the playback problem is probably due to the data rate of the drive that the media is stored on. uncompressed hd has a very high data rate, about 7 times that of uncompressed sd. i think the target data rate for capture and playback of uncompressed hd is around 320MB/s, so you’re looking at a fairly beefy sata2 raid to maintain 320MB/s.

almost everybody edits compressed hd. if you are looking for hd codecs, in addition to apple’s photojpeg, dvcprohd is fairly good, apple’s pro res 422 is nicer (if you have a mac and fcp), avid’s dnxhd is just as good, plus it’s cross-platform and free from avid. all of those work well with ae and should work well with a single drive’s.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW