Squeeze = Frustration!

Austinv

Austinv

Well-known member
Alright after hours of trying a million different export settings and trying all of the different encoders in Adobe Premiere CS3. I can not correctly export DVX100b squeeze footage at the proper aspect ratio. All of the footage I export looks stretched vertically and it just does not work.

Someone on this forum has to have the answer to my problem. What are you export settings from PP CS3 using squeeze footage from the DVX.
 
1) What are your Premiere Pro project settings?

2) What is your destination media and format? DVD, web, etc?

3) A million? Really? :P

With answers to at least the first two, we can help you find your way.
 
Ok lets just say, web and dvd.

An my PP settings:

General:

DV 24p
Timebase 23.976

Video 720X480

Aspect Ratio: Widescreen (1.2) 16:9

No Fields

Title Safe Area: 20%horizontal 20% vertical
Action Safe 10% horizontal 10% vertical

DV Capture
 
Austinv said:
Video 720X480

Aspect Ratio: Widescreen (1.2) 16:9
Click to expand...

There ya go. The pixel aspect ratio isn't square, which can cause some players to not correctly interpret it as widescreen. I'll bet if you import that file back into Premiere, it'll be displayed correctly. For a square PAR, export as 720 x 405.
 
To take the last reply a little farther, pixel aspect ratio or PAR refers to the ratio of a pixel's height to its width. A pixel, by definition, is always a single unit; however, the height of that single unit can be greater than the width, or vice-versa. A frame of DV is always 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall, regardless of whether the frame is full screen (4:3) or widescreen (16:9). Those ratios are screen aspect ratios, or SAR (or sometimes DAR for display aspect ratio). You can probably see, then, that there isn't a direct correlation between PAR and SAR. So, in other words:

Full screen, 4:3 DV - 720x480 pixels, pixel aspect ratio of 0.9
Widescreen, 16:9 DV - 720x480 pixels, pixel aspect ratio of 1.2 (you'll sometimes read of this being called full-height anamorphic, of FHA, because even though it's widescreen when looked at in its raw state, it'll fully fill a 4:3 frame)

HD formats are different yet again, but we'll stay away from that for now.

Since you shot in Squeeze mode, you're recording to a 720x480 DV frame, with a PAR of 1.2 (pixels are 1.2 times wider than they are tall). This is reflected in your project settings above--so far so good. If you want to go to DVD, and maintain the 16:9 aspect ratio, you're in luck as DVD players (most of them, anyway) will scale a properly-encoded MPEG-2 stream to be letterboxed on a 4:3 set, or will fully fill the frame of a 16:9 set. There are encoding presets built-in to Premiere Pro, accessible from the Media Encoder, to encode a 16:9 DVD-compliant MPEG-2 file. You'll see a radio button that will let you select the PAR of 0.9 or 1.2, depending on what your input source is--just select 1.2 and you'll be fine.

On the other hand, if you're going to the web, it's usually better to encode using square pixels with a 1.0 ratio (same height and width). This is probably the problem you're seeing with squished video. Square pixels are easier to encode and decode, so they are preferably for web delivery. All it really takes is some simple math, because you can more literally apply the 16:9 screen aspect ratio to maintain the widescreen appearance. Just pick your destination width and divide by 16/9, or your destination height and multiply by 16/9--that will give you the other dimension in square pixels. As a quick side note, it's also good practice to find values that are evenly divisible by 16, as most modern codecs use macroblocks that are 16x16 pixels, and will encode most efficiently when you do so. For widescreen content, I usually use something like 480x272 or 640x368--they're very close to 16:9 and they let the particular codec work its magic.

So to sum up: for DVD, export using a 720x480 frame with a 1.2 PAR; for web, export using a 1.0 PAR and whatever dimensions get you a 16:9 SAR.
 
Nevermind got it to work out. The quality does not look that great, how would I acheive the highest quailty for the web?
 
Austinv said:
Nevermind got it to work out. The quality does not look that great, how would I acheive the highest quailty for the web?
Click to expand...

Up the resolution, bit rate, encoder quality. Sort of an open ended question without seeing the current video and the specifications of how you encoded it.
 
The quality looks fine, given the source, for SD. If you want ways to improve it, you're going to need to tell us exactly what you compressed it as (res, bit rate, encoder, etc) prior to uploading.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top