HDV > Quicktime. Wrong aspect ratio. 4:3 not 16:9

NickHope wrote on 3/11/2010, 11:14 AM

I'm rendering interlaced HDV (anamorphic 1440x1080) to Quicktime MJPEG-B in Vegas 8.0c. Quicktime 7.6.2 installed. Pixel aspect ratio is set to 1.333

Quicktime (& MPEG Streamclip) on both PC and Mac displays the resulting .mov file at 4:3, not 16:9.

There seems to be some problem with Quicktime not receiving or respecting the correct DAR.

Anyone know if this can be fixed?

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 3/11/2010, 12:28 PM

Nick,
I think you are dealing with two nearly-identical overlapping issues.

First, Quicktime Player for Windows does not respect PAR. You have to adjust the render output dimensions for 1:1 playback in QT Player; i.e, 1920 x 1080.

Second, MJPEG .mov encoding in Vegas does not respect PAR, either. Same result, same cure. Why the option is exposed I think is an oversight.

In either event, the solution is to set a custom render size for 1920 x 1080 and render square pixels. It's a common issue working with HDV source. Let me know how this works for you.

NickHope wrote on 3/12/2010, 12:36 AM

Thanks musicvid. As I suspected, I'll have to go for square pixels to make Quicktime read it properly, and that does work fine.

One customer is going to convert to Apple ProRes 422HQ using MPEG Streamclip, so they could do the up-rezzing to 1920x1080 themselves as they render. MPEG Streamclip uses a "professional 2D-FIR scaler". I wonder whether that would give any better quality than whatever Vegas uses. Probably not as the scaling is only required in the horizontal direction.