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rendering correct aspect ratio
I’ve asked this question a few times here and have gotten some helpful feedback from the cow community. However, I’m still having some difficulties. Here goes once more 🙂
Ive rendered my sequence from Final Cut Express HD to a self contained quicktime movie. I’ve imported, worked my magic and am now ready to render. In order to keep the quality at its highest, I’ve been just choosing “none” under the compression type. Now here’s my dillemma…my footage is widescreen and I must have tried every size and shape to get that footage to render at the correct aspect ratio but no matter what I do, it seems to render out stretched. Can anyone tell me what the heck I’m doing wrong? I’ve looked at my footage specs in FCE and it says 720×480 but when I render for that in AE it still seems to stretch. ?????? Help please!!!
Bones
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3 Replies
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For something to look normal on the computer, it has to be rendered with square pixels.
HOWEVER, for something to play back on a TV, the pixels generally should not be square. In NTSC-land, a standard def TV is 4×3. But 720×480 is not 4X3 — it appears wider on a computer.
This is because 720×480 is designed to look 4×3 on a TV, where the standarr requires tall, narrow pixels, squishing the image back to 4×3.
Widescreen is the same. For TV and DVD, you should work in a DV Widescreen preset, and render that to 720×480. Your TV and DVD player/software will make it right.
Now to make it look “normal” while working in AE, click the Pixel Aspect Ratio correction switch at the bottom of the comp window.(FCP compensates for this normally, whereas AE doesn’t. You have to click the switch. But it will play fine in the end.)
For more info, search for Rick Gerard’s “Pixel madness” tutorial on the COW.
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Thanks Steve this is a huge help. Ill troublshoot this when I get home from work tonight. Just so you know, Im showing this on a projector on a 4×8 foot screen. We tested some footage the other day to see what it would look like and i must say, it didnt look that bad at all for rendering it out at 480×272!!! Im hooking my computer up to the projector and running it right onto the screen that way.
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in most cases the codec you choose won’t allow you to embed a par. You can in QTPro in the Movie Properties, but you can’t on render. If you’re footage isn’t looking right then either you have PAR correction turned off in AE’s comp window or the footage isn’t properly interpreted in your NLE, AE or QT. DV footage is limited to one frame size, the par only figures out how the footage is mixed with existing footage. The pixels don’t change, only they way they are displayed and mixed with other sources.
hope that’s clear.
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