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Pixel aspect ratio question
Hello
I have some trouble to decide which aspect ratio I should use for the project and the compostions. I shall make an animation for a customer who shall use it in various media (square pixel displays, Television (PAL), etc). I therefore first decided to use “D1/DV PAl (1,07)”. Is this a good decision? I’ve allready runed into a problem though. I’m going to do a shape animation with shapes I’ve made in Illustrator. When I copy them from Illustrator and past them into After Effects the shapes are slightly distorted. F.eks. a perfect round cirle gets oval. I guess this is because it is imported as from Illustrator as square pixels and then pasted into an After Effects comp who has rectangular pixels.
Can someone please give me some advices what to do here? Should I use square pixels in After Effects. If I do so, will this give me problems prepearing the animation for TV?
Thanks in advance.
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4 Replies
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If the customer is going to be using it on different types of screen perhaps consider giving it to them in a couple of different formats. Alternatively if you’re going to supply it as an authored DVD just use DV PAL as this will look the same on both a television and a computer monitor as the computer will compensate for it.
As for the second part of your question, the circle looks oval because you have it in a comp that is using rectangular pixels but is being displayed on a square pixel screen – if you output to a television it will look normal. You can simulate this in AE by using pixel aspect correction. To turn it on go click the little arrow at the top right of your comp window and go to ‘view options’, then check the box that says ‘Pixel Aspect Correction’. There is also a toggle switch for it at the bottom of the comp window.
Look at the Dr Strangepixel tutorial on the COW for more info.
hope this helps,
Tom -
Thanks for a good answer Tom!
Does that mean that if I use rectangulare (non-square) pixels in After Effects, there’s no problem rendering out a movie wiht square pixels with good result later?
I guess it’s worse to dot it the other way?Thanks in advance!
Thomas
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Yes. The easiest way to do it is to drop your rectangular pixeled comp into a square pixeled comp and render that.
Tom
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Thanks again Tom!
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