Squished Image Problem

bustak

bustak

Well-known member
I just started to shoot a documentary yesterday & the footage came out pretty good. I'm going to uprez it in post, so I have it set to LETTERBOX then for I can see where I can & can't shoot vertically.

I'm using Premiere 2.0 for capturing purposes, & in the timeline the footage looks fine (as in 4x3 w/ Black bars on the top & bottom). But when I play the avi's using Windows Media the image looks squished & stretched. Even when I convert the video using Nero Vision it does the same thing as in looking squished & stretched.

Has anyone experienced this problem? If so how did they fix it?

Thanx a lot!
 
Hey The Machinist,

Actually this isn't a uprez question. I shot the footage using the letterbox setting in the camera.

Here's a frame capture from the DVD (it's squished):
1156868760.jpg

1156866727.jpg

I'm just concerned/confused on why my footage is being treated as it was shot in squeeze mode, or by a actual 16:9 camera. The screen grab should have the TOP & BOTTOM black bars on it, right?

Maybe I'm just ignorant of 4:3 & Letterbox. I thought the letterbox mode was 4:3, but with little black strips covering up the top & bottom. I used this mode as a guide for when I do uprez, everything I wanted in the frame will be there.

So my question is why is it looking squeezed?

Thanx again! :)
 
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Hello Everyone!

Well, I received a private message from another DVX user, who's on the mac having the exact same problem with their letterbox footage (not squeezed mode) coming out squished.

Which makes me believe that this has happen to other people too, regardless of platform (PC/Mac).

If I take the squished footage & export it out of Premiere it's not longer squished, it's the proper 4:3. But I need to catalogue all my avi's for the doco I just shot, so I'd have to export 100's of avi's to watch non-squished footage.

So I'm writing again w/ an appeal asking someone to offer any info they have regarding this problem.

Thanx again!
 
Was this shot on an original DVX100? If I'm not mistaken (and I may be) the earliest DVX100s set the "16:9" flag in the data stream on letterbox footage, when they shouldn't have. So you may be seeing the effect of that. I don't know how to tell you to fix it; obviously re-exporting the footage fixes it because it gets written out as a 4:3 data file with the 16:9 flag turned off. If you play out to a 4:3 TV it should look fine too.
 
Hey Barry,

Actually it was shot on a DVX100b. I've taken the avi's & burned them as DVD files & it plays squished on my TV too.

So I guess I'll just thank my lucky stars that it's not squished after I export it with Premiere.

Thanx a lot Barry & The Machinist for your insight, this is a weird one! :)
 
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