Widescreen problem in Premiere Pro

[polar-blair]

Hi

I have the latest version of Premiere Pro CS4 and Have just finished editing a short movie of a Ski Trip I just got back from, I filmed the footage on my Casio Exilim EX-f1 in HD (720p) widescreen, When I copied the files over onto my MBP they looked fine right aspect ratio, pretty clear and good quality, I did some colour correction and image stabilization in AE and brought it all together in Premiere. Its all in Widescreen, and I got to export and the ratio is correct, I exported using h.264 and the PAL DV Widescreen preset, and in the Adobe Media encoder preview window it looks fine, but when I play back the file it has added to big black bars on the top and bottom of the footage turning it back into a 4:3 ratio

Is there anyway to fix this, it doesn't make any sense to me.

I did a search on the web and found out that I need to interperate the footage as a widescreen shot, to make it 16:9 but when I do that it stretches my footage and looks rubbish

Please any help would be great

 

[dougking]

Exporting Widescreen

I have had a similar problem with exporting widescreen footage in CS3. All the settings are correct, yet when the movie is exported it becomes squished into 4:3 rather than 16:9. Its infuriating. Have you managed to solve this problem polar - blair? If you have any tips or knowledge, please pass it on. I need help!

Many thanks.

 

[bki122689]

Are the sequence settings set to widescreen anamorphic?


Because if you edit in a sequence setting that's just DV, and since DV has a resolution of 720 X 480, it would letterbox 16:9 clips.

 

[kryten2001]

Guys I spent ages, and I mean ages scrawling the internet for an answer to this. Turns out the answer was to be found on an elgato website.

Anyway the problem appears to be related to the header of the MP4 file that adobe spews out. The file itself inside has the correct aspect ratio, but the MP4 file header doesn't... This normally isn't a problem, except the ATV appears to read the header of the file rather than the file encoded within it...

The solution appears to be here:

http://forums.elgato.com/viewtopic.php?f=85&t=738

I ran it on my premiere outputted files, and it works a treat. The correct ratio you want for 16:9 should be 1.4587. The standard container is set to output square pixels (1:1).

Try it. It'll work...

By the way, you'll notice the original files play fine in any computer based viewer, as they read the endoded files data and not the header of the file itself... Open it in Quicktime or VLC and you'll see.. Only the ATV fails to read the data from the correct place.. Who knows why... One for the Apple engineers eh.

The other solution is to output the actual resolution you need for square pixels to work (ie for PAL this is 1024x576, NTSC is 878x480 - I think)... This fixes it, but is VERY wasteful on space and you need a higher bit rate for the same quality exported video. This was the workaround I was using until I found this method which is far superior in terms of quality and 'accuracy'.