16:9 widescreen in Premiere

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devilry

Member
Sorry to start up yet another thread about widescreen stuff. But, i've read through the forums and the net and couldnt find the answers to my questions. Some people on this forum asked the questions i had but never got a direct and clear answer.

I just got my dvx100a and i've been testing it out, figuring out how it works and trying to achieve the best possible image I can get. I'm going to be shooting in 24p Advance and want to work in widescreen 16:9 format. I'll be using this footage mainly on the computer/internet. So my main concern is having my footage displaying 16:9 properly and perfectly without worrying about displaying it on 4:3 monitor.

I decided to shoot some test footage with squeeze mode and brought it into premiere. It looked great with no black bars, but when i exported it out it went all funky. When i export the widescreen (squeeze mode) footage with the pixel aspect ratio set at D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2), the footage comes out stretched vertically and looks nothing like the footage inside premiere. And if i set it to D1/DV NTSC (0.9) the footage looks normal but now it has black bars which i don't want and i know i can easily crop those. But the image to me looks like it shrunk compared to the footage inside premiere. All the settings are set to 720x480 uncompressed so I don't understand why the images come out so different compared to the footage inside premiere.

So my question is, how can i export the widescreen footage out of premiere perfectly without the black bars and the footage looking a bit 'smaller' than the original? Or is this how it works and that i have to crop the black bars in order to get the footage to be proper 16:9 ratio? And is there an explanation for the video coming out 'smaller' when exported?

By the way, i also tried doing the "Procedure for uprezzing 4x3 letterbox to 16x9". But for some odd reason when i export my footage into TIFF's and import them into Photozoom it just crashes the program. I tried doing it a hundred times in different ways, reinstalling/uninstalling/re-rendering, etc, but stil keeps crashing. I tried using Targa instead and it worked perfectly fine. Is there any difference between using TIFF vs. Targa?

Before i shoot my film, i want to make sure i can get the best image possible and understand the whole workflow when editing. So any help with this will be greatly appreciated, thank you.
 
If you are exporting to uncompressed AVI, then most players won't respect the pixel aspect ratio flags (WMP for instance). What are you using to check your footage after export? If you import it back into Premiere, just make sure that the PAR is right and use Interpret Footage if it isn't. If you are using some other program, again, you may need to manually set the PAR to get it to playback correctly.

If you only want to watch it on the computer, then you may want to export to a square pixel format and resize on export. You could export to 854x480 1.0 PAR, or 720x304, depending on which way you want to resize it.
 
Hey thanks Joshua, that helped out a lot. I never knew i had to manually configure the players to play the video properly. I got the footage looking right now. But is 854x480 1.0PAR the best setting? When i compare it with the original footage, i can see that the quality had degraded abit. Not a lot of quality loss, but still enough that seems abit bothersome. I exported it out as an uncompressed targa sequence. Is the quality loss normal? Because its a '2nd generation' footage now?

When i export at 720x480 1.2PAR, and bring that back into premiere, the footage looks identical to the original, there's little to no loss in quality. If i work with these settings and show the video on the internet, will people see the footage properly as 16:9 widescreen? Or will they have to also manually configure their players? The final output format will be in quicktime, if that helps.
 
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devilry said:
If i work with these settings and show the video on the internet, will people see the footage properly as 16:9 widescreen? Or will they have to also manually configure their players? The final output format will be in quicktime, if that helps.
Click to expand...

The pixel aspect isn't going to mean anything on the web. If you have 16:9 widescreen (not letterboxed, but actual 1.2 PAR) video, you simply need to export it at a 16:9 resolution with square pixels. For example, 720x405 or 854 x 480. The codec you choose might limit your options, but if you're going from Premier, I'd try exporting a MOV using Sorenson 3.
 
Oh ok, sounds simple enough thanks man. I actually do use sorenson 3, a great codec i use all the time.
 
If you use 854x480, then you are horizontally stretching out the footage, and you will see some quality loss. If you use 720x405, you are vertically squeezing the footage, so it will actually look a little sharper (but it's smaller, of course).

Are you comparing quality with or without compression. Obviously Sorrensen or any other format will lose some quality.
 
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