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I just need to know if I’m doing this right or wrong
I’m creating some animation in AE CS3, all my work is created in Photoshop at the Pal Widescreen setting (I think 720×576 if I remember correctly).
Now what I wanted to create in terms of my output was a nice widescreen video, which I presumed was 16×9 so I selected that in my composition settings, as it was what I was lead to believe Pal Widescreen was.
When I imported my images and placed them in my comp, the images looked a little squashed but I toggled the little pixel aspect ration correction button underneath my comp window and it stretched it out to look exactly as I wanted, so I thought that my problem was solved.
When i came to render my video, I made sure everything was right (16×9 Widescreen in my output options) then after it had done rendering, I watched it in Quicktime and it just looked like a squashed 4×3. I Full Screen-ed it (I don’t know why I thought this may help) but everything still looked terrible.I have read everything related to pixel aspect ratio I can find in Adobe’s LiveDocs site for AEcs3 and I also read the “understand pixel aspect ration” article that I found on the FAQ’s page of this site’s forum page (linked just below) and I hate to admit I don’t feel that I understand it any better.
I changed my comp settings to Square pixel widescreen, after having read about it here: https://www.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/pixel_madness/index.html
My pixel aspect ratio is now square pixels and my comp changed to the widescreen I wanted.(Sorry if I’m providing too much detail but I want to make sure you know everything I did so I can be told at what stage I went wrong.)
I also read about interpreting footage, so I was smart enough to realise the images I had created in Photoshop for this project would be different to the composition settings I had now, so i interpreted the footage to the same as my comps (widescreen square pixel) and i rendered a few seconds of it just so i could get a watch of it in Quicktime and it is coming out widescreen EXACTLY as i wanted it, no longer the ‘squashed to 4×3’ screen it appeared to be before.
Have I done this correctly?
I’m not sure why I used Pal DV/ Widescreen, I think I got told in a workshop to always use it.Also if anybody is feeling generous could they please explain the difference to me between square pixels and non square.
So far my understand is:PAL D1/DV Widescreen = non square pixels, used for live video footage
PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixels = square pixels (obviously), used for motion graphics?
I know there are several other’s but for the time being all I need to know about are those two.
Thanks in advance to anybody willing to help.
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5 Replies
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QuickTime Player usually does not display things as they would appear on their native display device (a widescreen PAL device in your case). Instead it displays them in square pixels… To test and make sure that your footage is correct I recommend bringing it back into AE, interpreting it as widescreen footage and putting it in a widescreen PAL composition with pixel aspect correction on.
[mike kov] “Also if anybody is feeling generous could they please explain the difference to me between square pixels and non square. “
Square pixels are square, where as non-square pixels are… not square =)
As a general rule I never use a square pixel comp for anything that is going to a non-square pixel device. Square pixel compositions use pixel resolutions that are not supported by the target non-square pixel format. For example, a Square Pixel PAL D1/DV comp is 768×576, but that is not the resolution expected by PAL devices. So in order to get it to work properly it needs to be squashed down to 720×576… which will look the same* as something done in a regular non-square pixel PAL 720×576 comp from AE, it just adds another unnecessary step. There may be times when using a square pixel composition would make sense, however.
*since the 768×576 render has more pixels, and you’re scaling it down horizontally you will end up with some horizontal resampling, which is not necessarily good or bad… but I still remain wary of square pixel comps.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Hey, thanks for the reply, I did as you asked.
I got one of the rendered videos that looked “squashed” when I played it in Quicktime and brought it back into AE.
With the pixel aspect ratio correction on and making sure the footage was interpreted to widescreen, it played like I wanted my widescreen video to play.So what this means/what you’re saying is, the video is technically in a widescreen format if I played it on a widescreen TV. But it’s quicktime/vlc player etc on my mac that makes the video look squashed?
Also, about the square/non square pixel thing, while there’s nothing wrong with the square pixel format, from what I understand from what you said, the ‘horizontal resampling’ that would be done on the square pixel format, would be similar to what Quicktime was doing to my PAL D1/DV Widescrren video, but resampling it vertically?
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[mike kov] “from what I understand from what you said, the ‘horizontal resampling’ that would be done on the square pixel format, would be similar to what Quicktime was doing to my PAL D1/DV Widescrren video, but resampling it vertically?”
I think you got most of it under your belt, I’m just not sure what you’re asking with this last question.
QuickTime is displaying the pixels as they are, only in square pixels. Since widescreen PAL pixels are wider than they are tall the image will be stretched out horizontally when displayed on a widescreen PAL display even though the pixels are the exact same pixels that QuickTime is displaying. Since QuickTime is displaying these pixels as square pixels, the image appears to be squeezed (or, put another way, the pixels appear to be not stretched).
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Darby thank you so much for your help.
Even though you didn’t understand that last question you still answered it!!
🙂That’s all i needed to know. If the PAL widescreen will actually play widescreen on TV (just not properly on quicktime, for the reason you have stated) then that’s perfect.
Thanks again for your help
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As someone who works with PAL widescreen, I can confirm that this will work on a PAL tv.
Simon Bonner
youtube.com/simonsaysFX
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