Square pixels to NTSC

[egproductions]

I have a screen recording that was recorded at 864x480 (9:5) square pixels. I want to export this to DVD but adobe media encoder doesn't like the resolution or PAR because its trying to conform it to NTSC DVD. I tried bring the file into a 720x480 1.2 project but I can see that edges lost some sharpeness. Why is this happening if I kept the PAR of the file as square? Its not major sharpness that being lost but its enough to annoy me and know this can't be the proper workflow. Is there a better way of doing this? My 720x480 project is uncrompressed so that isn't the issue...it has to do with the changin of PAR.

Its weird though, when I import a square pixel graphic into a DV project I never saw any issues....any thoughts?

[Andy Olson]

It probably looks like it lose some sharpness because it probably is being either resized by your NLE or your NLE is just showing you 720 of the 864 pixels that are there. It may just look lower resolution on the preview but it could be the NLE doing something funky to it.

You might try to open a timeline with the resolution set to the 864x480 square and export it as 720x480 ntsc. This probably will change your aspect though because it will fit the whole 864 into the 720. Another option is scaling the 864 to 720 and have black bars on top and bottom. This way you will get your whole picture because otherwise you can't fit 864x480 into 720x480 without either changing the aspect ratio or letterboxing/cropping.

I find that a program like After Effects will do a better job of allowing you to resize it to what you want.

Best,
Andy