[Jeremy Abbott]

I’m kind of baffled why it’s even an issue? Why not just sign up for Creative Cloud, at an annual price cheaper than buying any single Adobe program outright, and have access to all the CS software and guaranteed early updates?

I’m not criticizing, I’m just genuinely curious why someone would want to purchase the products on their own now? I did notice that you can get subscription versions of individual products now, like with the Cloud, but I would assume those would get early updates as well. Even then, if you use more than two the Cloud’s still cheaper.

[Jeremy Abbott]

Hmm ah ok. Well I’ve only worked with PAL once before, but it was widescreen and as far as I’m aware (I could be wrong) the proportions for widescreen PAL and NTSC work out to be the same. So if you’re taking footage that was originally true HD (so say 1080p), which is the same size universally, and compressing it down to SD widescreen, you will still have the same issues of the HD footage not compressing to the same frame size.

What this then means is that the video isn’t being squashed in on the left and right sides, it’s being scaled to fit the SD widescreen frame. So to make it fit perfectly, you have two options:

1) stretch it a few pixels wide to fit
2) crop it a few pixels top and bottom to fit

Which means that ideally you should crop it so as to avoid distortion, and no one would ever notice the difference of 26-28 pixels anyway. If you would rather stretch it though, I’m not sure how many pixels wider you’d want to make it, you’d have to play around or look elsewhere on the web for tips.

Like I said though, I’ve only worked with PAL once so this could be entirely wrong. I’d say give it a try though at least and see what you think.

And of course, this cropping is something you would do from premiere when you export the footage in the first place. It’s not something you really have control over in Encore.

[Jeremy Abbott]

Your issue has to do with converting HD video to NTSC widescreen. In short, it’s a mathematical situation.

The simple solution is you need to crop either 28 or 27 pixels from the top and bottom of your source HD video. Try cropping 14/14 or 14/13 and see how you like the results.