4:3 trouble in AE

M

Mircosid

Member
Shot some footage with a Panasonic DV camera (not a DVX) in 16:9. Weird thing about this camera is that when you shoot widescreen instead of 4:3, the display shows a squished image -- everyone's really tall. No problem once you dump the files into FCP, it looks normal. But we need to work on some shots in AE. When we import them they turn back into these compressed 4:3 images. Is this because of the way they were originally shot? Something else? We can't figure out how to get around the problem. Any ideas?

-M
 
You're seeing the images as they really are- squashed. FCP can unsquash them on the fly.
In AE click on the 4th botton on the bottom from the right in the comp window if you wish to temp view. (Pixel Aspect ratio correction)
 
I'm not sure that's going to be enough. When we import the changed files back into FCP they still retained the squashed look, and the image quality was awful. My editor is thinking he may be able to convert the image in AE to widescreen, then import it to FCP. Seems like a lot of steps. Shouldn't this be simpler?

-M
 
You should be able to import/expot from AE with no quality loss.
Are you doing a resize or is the comp set to the right size and aspect ratio?
What's your final target? For things like DVD's the machine/tv will be doing the unsqueezing.
 
I would check you comp settings in AE. AE doesn't unsquash the image automatically like FCP might. If the resulting image from using the widescreen feature on your camera is supposed to be 16:9, then you have to adjust your composition settings to match (frame size and PAR).

Your resulting render from AE would be a video file with a 16:9 resolution (no longer squashed 4:3)
 
You may have already done this, but you need to make sure both your comp settings and your footage interpretation are 16:9.

For the footage itself, right click on it, go "Interpret Footage > Main", and in Other Options change the Pixel Aspect Ratio to "D1/DV NTSC Widescreen (1.2)"

Same deal with the PAR in Comp Settings, as mentioned above.

I'm not that familiar with FCP specifically, but I'd be quite surprised if there was no way to force it to treat any video file as widescreen instead of 4:3...

Oh yeah, again maybe obvious, but make sure your Resolution in Comp Settings is set to Full
 
overnighttolondon said:
You may have already done this, but you need to make sure both your comp settings and your footage interpretation are 16:9.

For the footage itself, right click on it, go "Interpret Footage > Main", and in Other Options change the Pixel Aspect Ratio to "D1/DV NTSC Widescreen (1.2)"

Same deal with the PAR in Comp Settings, as mentioned above.

I'm not that familiar with FCP specifically, but I'd be quite surprised if there was no way to force it to treat any video file as widescreen instead of 4:3...

Oh yeah, again maybe obvious, but make sure your Resolution in Comp Settings is set to Full
Click to expand...

Ditto.

When you create a composition in AE, make sure the widescreen format is chosen, and AE interprets yer footage correctly. That should be all you need.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top