4:3 to 16:9 without reducing quality

[trickytree]

Hi all

I have just purchased a Samsung SMX-F30 which I am very happy with, especially as it reords to MP4 H264 and has a 16:9 recording mode.

I use iMovie HD to put together my creations (family videos etc.) and I have been using it for several years and I'm very happy with what it can do and am comfortable with it.

Here's the prob - when I record in 16:9, the file it creates still looks like a 4:3, but with the image horizontally squashed - and it stays that way if i drop it into imovie.

If I use the Cyberlink software that came with the camera on my PC, it looks fine, in glorious widescreen.

Am I right in thinking that the cyberlink software just 'stretches' the image out??

I can use ffmpegx to do the same thing but the quality seems to drop drastically - can I just alter the dimensions without altering the quality?? (e.g. a 7mb file drops to 1mb)

I hope you can make sense of what I have put here!!

Any questions, please feel free to ask.



Thanks in advance

[Case]

For using widescreen footage in iMovie, first open/start a 16:9 project, then import the video. When starting with a 4:3 project, you often can't use 16:9 anymore.

To check on any stretching of video, you need to know the true resolution (pixel width and height). I suggest MediaInfo Mac, as it gets a all the details of just about any video file.
It is common for SD (standard definition) material to stretch for widescreen, e.g. like DV and DVD MPEG-2.

MP4 allows for stretching video to 'any' display aspect ratio, but the player/decoder has to have support for reading that setting. Unfortunately, QuickTime doesn't have the best track record on that.
Does VLC display your source file in the correct aspect ratio?

[rumplestiltskin]

The problem is that the Samsung is not setting the wide-screen flag properly. I find my MX20 does the same thing. I run the video through MPEG Streamclip and alter the resolution there so there's no wide-screen flag; the footage is actually now the correct proportion.