Widescreen footage not showing as widescreen?

[andrew00]

Hi,

I'll freely admit to having more questions than answers with Vegas, so I hope my question isn't too annoyingly obvious.

I'm ready to capture and edit 15 hours of footage I shot recently, but before I start I have one consideration.

With some random test footage that I shot I did the 'tape over the LCD' method to frame widescreen with the intention of cropping in Vegas and outputting a widescreen video.

I captured on a PAL widescreen 25P timeline, edited and outputted as a widescreen video, an AVI file, just to my PC.

When I play the video in Windows Media Player it plays as it should, as a widescreen video. However when I play with VLC player, Winamp, Divx player etc - the video plays as 4:3, losing the extra widescreen information and therefore looking stretched.

Can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong here? I don't want to start this mammoth editing until I know I'm sorted. As far as I knew I did everything correct - editing on a widescreen timeline, outputted as widescreen, and yet still this problem.

Thanks a lot for your replies.

[Jason Ramsey]

I have no idea if this will help you or not as my knowledge of vegas is rather infantile, but I seem to remember that when you choose to render the video. The window that pops up has an option to check or uncheck something along the lines of "fill frame output size. do not letterbox" I would think you would want to make sure that option is not checked to be sure that your final render will letterbox on displays that are not 16:9. sorry if this doesn't help you at all
Jason

[andrew00]

Yeah it hasn't been checked in the videos I've made.

The thing that confuses me is that if I go to like VLC player or Winamp or whatever and TELL them to display the video in 16:9 then it does and the video plays as it should. The problem is that it doesn't do it automatically.

Now I'm gonna be putting my video on a DVD, and I'm perturbed that if it isn't automatically going to 16:9 now then it won't on the DVD and I'll make all these dodgy stretched looking videos.

[ovjamaica]

It may just be a player problem though. If one player (WMP) is playing it correctly and the others are not it may just be the preferences of the other players. I'm not sure, just hazarding a guess. I'll try it at home when I get things unpacked. :D Just moved to a new house last week.

[Jason Ramsey]

agree with jamaica. why don't you try burning an actual dvd and playing it in some table top players with your tv. And see if your dvd playing software on your comp. plays it correctly. As long as it works in your regular dvd player on a tv, you should be fine. i would think
jason

[andrew00]

Yeah, I definately think it's an easily solved problem, I guess I just didn't want to start down the long editing road if there was a simple box I needed to tick or something at the start.

Speaking of boxes - when starting a new project, should I be selecting the best of everything? Best rendering, 5.1 audio etc all that stuff.