Unwanted letterbox(?) of stills in preview window

TheMountains wrote on 3/21/2002, 6:08 PM
I've searched this forum for an answer to this minor problem, but the answer eludes me. First, I am a recent (one week) convert to VF2 from VW4 (thanks to the recurring/consistent problems I read on the MGI website that were consistent with my problems!! - and thanks to VinceG, wrangler95 and lody), and I love VF so far. I am working on an existing project that I started in VW4 - Video is already captured, and all the stills I want to use as well were extracted using VW4. Now I'm finishing project in VF (thank GOD for a decent program!) Previously captured AVI's look fine in preview window (I've not yet rendered new video), but all of the previously captured stills have the black bars above and below image (looks like letterbox) in the preview window. This did not happen in VW. 1) What is going on? 2) Is there a workaround to re-format the stills, or do I need to junk the already extracted stills, and re-extract using VF? Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

jimcho wrote on 3/21/2002, 7:52 PM
Welcome to the club.

To answer your question, since pictures use square pixels and DV uses rectangular pixels, you need to crop your pictures to a size of 654x480, 655x480 or a multiple thereof.

You can crop it using the pan/crop tool in VF. On the timeline, click on the "FX" button of the picture, select the pan/crop tab, right-click the picture and select "Match Output Aspect".

VideoWave incorrectly takes snapshots at 720x480 so I'm not sure these will give the proper aspect ratio in VF. Try it and let us know how it turns out.

If you had taken the snapshots in VF, they would have the correct size of 654x480.

There was a recent discussion on this in the Vegas forum if you want to read up on it some more.
TheMountains wrote on 3/22/2002, 9:48 AM
Thanks for the info jimcho, and for the link to the Vegas forum discussion. I'll play with my project this weekend, and if I come up with any more questions (undoubtadly, I will), I'll post. I've read many posts from you and chienworks (and others, no offense), and you've all helped immensely in mine (and others) understanding/utilization of VF2. Thanks
Biotron2000 wrote on 3/22/2002, 11:01 AM
If you don't mind cropping it a bit, select 4:3 from the drop-down box near the top of the pan window.

Patrick