ratio check

[Steve Roberts]

Drag the 864×540 QT into a 720×540 comp. You can either letterbox the video or chop off the sides. You generally don’t want to squeeze it (to fit) and thus distort it. To letterbox the video, use the “fit to width” shortcut, ctrl+alt+shift+H on Windows, cmd+opt+shift+H on Mac.

To render, drag the 720×540 comp into a 720×486 (or 480) *preset* comp and render that.

If they want it widescreen, drag the QT into an 864×486 square pixel comp. You’ll have to let the top and bottom be chopped off, or show black bars on either side. This is called “pillarboxing”, and is not as well accepted as letterboxing.

To render, drag the 864×486 comp into a D1 or DV widescreen *preset* comp. If you use DV (480), let the top and bottom 3 pixels go offscreen. (If you had interlaced sources, you’d have to bump the comp up one pixel, but that’s not the case here.)

[Fred]

thanks steve,

got a question about precomping 540 layers in After Effects:

If my Quicktime movie is 864 x 540, do I have to pre-comp the QT movie in a 720 x 540 comp?
Can’t I just drag the 864 x 540 movie into a NTSC D1, 720 x 486 After Effects Comp, and scale it down to 90% even, letting the sides be chopped off.

Isn’t that doing the same thing as the 720 x 540 Pre-Comp Fit. You’re scaling the 540 Pre-comp to 90% as well.

They both look the same when I A/B compare them.

Is that ok?

[Steve Roberts]

Yes you can, as long as you use the D1 720×486 comp preset.

[Sam Moulton]

864 X 540 is a weird picture ratio. Doesn’t make 4:3, doesn’t make 16:9

It does make 8:5 which is a long way from 4:3. You’ll end up with 72 pixel wide bars on either side of the comp if you keep full height because 720 X 540 is 4:3

If you don’t want the black bars you need to fit to width which crops off the top and bottom. You can either do this in a 720 X 540 comp or by dragging your SQ pixel Flash QT into a D1 comp and fitting horizontally. Make sure the X and Y scale values are the same and you are good to go for render