Comments

Ivan Lietaert wrote on 3/25/2009, 12:58 AM
In file<properties make sure to set it to widescreen.
Then drag the video to the timeline. Then hit the pan and crop icon and select the 16:9 preset.
You can do the same for the entire timeline by using the video track's 'track motion' icon and then zooming in.
OhMyGosh wrote on 3/25/2009, 9:41 AM
That seems to work good Ivan. Do you know what, if any effect changing the par has on picture quality, and does that slow down rendering having to convert all those pixels? Being widescreen, I wonder what would happen if you tried to render in HD??? Thanks. Cin
Chienworks wrote on 3/25/2009, 12:46 PM
Oddly enough, the PAR isn't what has any efffect on the video quality. Remember that 4:3 and widescreen are still both 720 pixels wide. What's happening when this is done is that the center 360 or so pixels vertically are stretched out to 480.

Pan/Crop is a much better way to do this than Track Motion. Pan/Crop adjusts the image to the output frame size/shape first using the maximum source resolution possible, then resamples the image to the output resolution. Track Motion resamples first, then resizes the resampled image. It's not so bad if you're making the image smaller, but if you make it larger Track Motion quickly reduces the image to mud.

If you render the widescreen result to HD you'll end up stretching all the pixels out a bit more. That aside, it works fine. It just won't look like HD; it will look like you've zoomed in on a small image.
namewithheldbyrequest wrote on 4/13/2009, 10:25 AM
Of course you need to select an appropriate widescreen option for the project and if this question is what I think it is (i.e., your DV camera records 16x9 @ 720x480), you need to take the extra step of selecting the correct aspect ratio (1.212 widescreen) for the clip's media properties. First import the clip, right click the clip and select Properties, go to the Media tab, and select the correct widescreen pixel ratio about midway down the dialog. My DV-AVI clips were not getting set correctly and it took me a while to get this correct.

Almost all comsumer camera record 16x9 at either 720x480 or 1440x960 with a non-square aspect ratio. This may be more automatic if you pull the video directly from the camera inside VMS but DV-AVI from some other source will probably have this issue.