Picture squishing... aspect ratio blues?

T*Bob Tubb wrote on 2/1/2005, 4:38 PM
I've read a whole lot of posts on here about media/pictures being squished, but none that match my particular meltdown. Here goes...

I'm trying to make transitions from my menu to each piece of media on it. I'm going to use adobe after effects to make the transition videos, but I'm not even to that point yet. Today I just put together a DVDA structure with stills instead of transitions, just to see how long the 'seek' time is between the transition media and the media itself.

So to make the stills, I just took the first frame of the Vegas-encoded MPEG-2 (I always use this DVDA format and have never had a problem) video as a snapshot. I tried first doing it in adobe, creating a 720x480 psd, and then tried just 'saving to clipboard' from the original vegas project. from the clipboard, I pasted into a 720x480 photoshop document, and saved.

Both ways, the stills, as media, get squished into a letterbox. It's not really that bad, and the boxed out areas are outside the safe zone, but what's inside the safe zone is still compressed, and so the transition from the stills to the start of the media is not smooth. it jumps in size.

I'm sure it's a problem with MPEG2s being in .909 pixel aspect ratio, and pictures being read as square pixel... but I don't think there's an image format that stores aspect ratio, is there?

Is there another file format which works better than photoshop? jpeg? gif? Or, do I have to change the resolution to acommodate for this squishing? If so, what resolution should I go to?

Thanks!

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/1/2005, 4:56 PM
Create your still images as 654x480 and they'll fit just fine.
T*Bob Tubb wrote on 2/1/2005, 4:58 PM
Rockin! thanks.

Oh, I tried making the DVD image to see if in the real DVD the squishing would be corrected or not... the answer is *not*.
T*Bob Tubb wrote on 2/3/2005, 3:53 PM
Also noticed that the 'snapshots' in Adobe After Effects of the MPEG-2 video are a little bit brighter than the actual MPEG-2s as read by DVD architect. Has anyone else experienced this? Can't figure out what causes that... I don't have any effects in After Effects turned on.

the 654x480 size is pretty good, but not perfect. Good enough for my purposes anyway.
Chienworks wrote on 2/4/2005, 8:33 AM
Try 655x480 instead. The actual value is 654.545454... x 480, but it's a little hard to create fractional pixel images.