Another 16:9 question (encoding)

Cooldraft wrote on 12/3/2005, 8:28 PM
I know someone here must have experienced this and hopefully will share the findings to overcome. I have this footage converted to 16:9 using ultimate-s. I changed the project to NTSC DV (to get the black bars, rendered it out to AVI. Looks great with the black bars and everything. I go to encode it to wmv and the encoder seems to get the pixel ratio ot something wrong and loses the bars and stretches the video. Anyone know how to get encoder to not stretch?

Comments

jaegersing wrote on 12/3/2005, 9:27 PM
Are you testing the wmv in Vegas or Windows MediaPlayer? WMP sometimes misinterprets clip aspect ratios.

Richard Hunter
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/3/2005, 10:07 PM
> Anyone know how to get encoder to not stretch?

Yea, render it as 16:9. (i.e., DV Widescreen)

> I changed the project to NTSC DV (to get the black bars

Why would you actually want to burn black bars into your video? It kind of defeats the purpose of converting it to 16:9. You could have just as easily added black bars as a mask to your 4:3 footage and been done with it.

Ultimate S changes the project to DV Widescreen so that 4:3 devices correctly add the black bars on-the-fly in playback and 16:9 devices display it natively without black bars. It also gives 4:3 users a choice of cropping to fullscreen on some players. The way you have it now, if you view that footage on a 16:9 display will have black bars on the top and bottom AND on the left and right sides because its 4:3 material.

If you converted the footage to 16:9 in US2 then just leave it as 16:9 by rendering to DV Widescreen.

~jr
Cooldraft wrote on 12/3/2005, 11:46 PM
They both seem to do it. I tried rendering out of vegas (wmv) with the same result.

I am re-rendering it right now as Johnny Roy suggested (in widescreen). I really did not want the black bars, just did not know how windows encoder 9 would deal with non 4:3. First time I've ventured away from NTSC DV out of the box. Thanks for the tips. Are there some guides/kb somewhere that answer questions like these?