Can't you tell by right-clicking on the media and choosing Properties?? The Pixel Aspect Ratio should tell the story.

This is what I get with a 4:3 test clip:



and this is what I get with the same thing when I render to a 16:9 file:

Vegas is just looking at a bit that's set in the file's header information to report the aspect ratio, not all AVI files have this bit set, so it is possible that Vegas will report this incorrectly. However, It should be fairly obvious just by looking at the image to determine whether it's widescreen or not.

Doh!

I suppose I should clarify my comment about it being obvious whether it's widescreen or not. There are a lot of ways that the flag can get messed up. There are usually some clues though, like if people look unnaturally tall and skinny, this would indicate that it should be set for widescreen or if circles don't look circular would be another indication. In case Vegas doesn't figure it out, you will have to get into the clip properties and change the aspect ratio manually. DV files are almost always flagged correctly unless you process the files outside of Vegas with a program the doesn't deal with aspect ratios.

Let me re-phrase that.

In the Vegas Explorer, when I click on a .mpg, .mov. .avi or .wmv, I don't get the kind of info box shown above, but this kind:




Which does not matter except that it does not show the PAR.

????

and, BTW, there's no problem loading it up and looking at it. That usually works. I was just trying to scan a few files and see which was which without actually loading the file.

PS how do you make a link in a forum post into an actual link? My photobucket link just shows up as text.

Like this:
[ img=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v440/red69stepside/Propertiesvegas.jpg ]
but remove the space after the leading bracket and before closing bracket

Ok, so I loaded some clips and right-clicked properties on them. Got the right kind of properties box.

couple of wide AVIs gave me the correct 0.9091 info, but then, I got the following info from some files I'd encoded:

WMVs: 1.000
Mpg: 0.9132
Mpeg 4: 1.000
Avi : 0.9091

I encoded these with vegas templates. Which templates I used has faded into mental obscurity.

RCourtney:

Thank you. This will be useful.

John Cline wrote"
In case Vegas doesn't figure it out, you will have to get into the clip properties and change the aspect ratio manually"

John, that made me thinking, I got some footage that is AVI and looks squished and appears 4:3 on the screen, but I think should be 16:9
How do I set the clip property to be widescreen within Vegas?

Ted

Use the pan/crop function. It will show you whether the actual video has any black bars in the video. If you don't see black bars in pan/crop, but you do see them in preview, then the project properties do not match the clip's properties. If you then carefully look at the actual pixels (e.g., 720x480) AND you look at the aspect ratio (e.g., 0.9091), if they BOTH match (i.e., the clip and the project properties match in every respect) but you still see bars in the preview, then more than likely the header for the video file is screwed up, as John suggests. In that case, change it in the media files properties.