Vegas being inconsistent with aspect ratios.

Jakebob wrote on 9/3/2013, 3:14 PM
I'm on Movie Studio HD Platinum 11, and I'm trying to edit a video whose resolution is 720 by 480, which has an aspect ratio of 3:2. I open Movie Studio and choose the media properties by using the video as a template. The video has a ratio of 720 by 480, but the display says it's got a display of 640 by 480, which is 4:3 instead of 3:2. This makes editing said videos difficult because there's a nice big area on the side of the video that doesn't get shown because Movie Studio changes the preview and outputs. Is there an explanation for why this is happening? I've tried looking for options in the previews but it doesn't seem to show anything.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/3/2013, 3:21 PM
It's because your 720x480 video really is 4:3 (well, actually 4.133333:3). The issue you're missing is that the pixels are narrower than they are tall, a ratio of 0.90909 wide by 1.0 tall, so the 720 pixels get squished horizontally into a narrower width than you think they should be. The actual display size is 654.54x480, which is just a touch wider than 4:3.

If you set up your project for the default NTSC DV project properties (not widescreen), Vegas will take care of everything correctly for you.
Jakebob wrote on 9/3/2013, 3:55 PM
Well, this is what's really confusing me. Here's an image of the video as it looks in Media Player: http://puu.sh/4ijGH.png

And here's an image of the video after I've put it through Vegas: http://puu.sh/4ijyS.png (with intentional colour correction to highlight the error)

If it were pixel sizes, then the video would be getting shrunk instead of cut-off. If I watch the video in Media Player, then it's alright, but putting it into Sony Vegas, Vegas decides to take a bit off the sides. Fiddling with pixel ratios doesn't have much of an effect past shrinking the video.

Edit #1: Also, the video is PAL, not NTSC, and whilst the video I use as an example might only have black borders around it, the idea remains that it's liable to do this to other similar videos.

Edit #2: Okay, it might lie in the video I'm trying to use. I recorded something with Fraps that was at 720x480, and it was able to go into Sony Vegas without errors. But using that same default template with the M2TS file causes the edges to be cut off.
musicvid10 wrote on 9/3/2013, 4:27 PM
Search "match media settings" on the forum and the Sony knowledgebase. Your problems will be solved.

Also, the Fraps forums have a body of knowledge for using their source in Vegas. Best of luck.
Chienworks wrote on 9/3/2013, 9:07 PM
I can't see the problem you're describing in the pictures you posted. Both images look pretty much identical for shape and how much of the frame is shown. It might have helped if you had used the same frame from the video in both images. As it is, there's no way to see that anything has been cut off at all. The "Leon" graphic certainly looks as if it's the same number of pixels away from the edge in both images.
Jakebob wrote on 9/6/2013, 6:51 AM
I think I managed to find out what was going on, for the most part. Turns out that Media Player was the culprit, making it look like the video was indeed bigger than I thought it was. I took a closer look in my capture software and the screen had thinner black bars on the sides than it did on the top and bottom, it's just that it wasn't immediately obvious.

And with the two images I posted, the first image looked like it was uniformly black, but again, it was Media Player being a bit pants. The second image was the proper video, but with added black bars because I tried rendering it in 720x480. It doesn't make much sense in all honesty.
musicvid10 wrote on 9/6/2013, 9:54 AM
"It doesn't make much sense in all honesty."

Time for you to meet the three Ratio brothers, Par, Sar, and Dar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio