320x240 Render - Black Bars On Sides - Why?

Nathan_Shane wrote on 5/19/2005, 11:34 AM

Okay, I've got to be overlooking some setting here. I've got a project that has some DV footage from my Sony camcorder, a couple PNG pictures, and some Text generated from Vegas.

I changed the project properties to 320x240 so I could see what my final render woud look like, and even editing in Vegas everything looks great and the video preview window is 320x240 as well.

But when I just rendered to QT, MPG2, and WMV (making sure the render size was set for 320x240), there are black bars that show up on the left & right sides of the video preview window as it renders and is in the final product.

So why are these black bars only showing up when rendering and in the final rendered file...how do I get rid of them???

Comments

Laurence wrote on 5/19/2005, 11:40 AM

It sounds like you don't have the aspect ratio set to "1". If you used a template it would have already been set for you. If you started from scratch you may have missed this.

Nathan_Shane wrote on 5/19/2005, 4:03 PM

Thanks Laurence, you were right, it was the aspect ratio...and I did start from scratch rather than using a template. Guess I need to study up more on the pixel aspect ratio...it's confusing.

Looking at the media I was using, I had to click on the properties of each one and manually change the ratio to "1" and that seemed to take care of the problem.

BillyBoy wrote on 5/19/2005, 4:20 PM

All aspect ratio means when selected is that the file keeps its relationship to width and heigth. If you deselect then you can stretch to make it wider or taller, probably not want you want in most situations since that will distort the image because you're changing the ratio.

When you see something like 4:3 (standard TV) or 16:9 (wide screen) it referes to the ratio of height to width. So in a standard TV there are 4 units in width to every 3 in height while there are 16 in width for wide screen and only 9 in height.

Originally Hollywood made movies in 4:3 ratio. Then because they feared that television was keeping people out of the theaters, they switched to the wider screen format. Televisions have taken a long time to catch up.