See pictures full screen in Premiere without distortion

[jones_randy]

I create lots of photo montages using adobe premiere 6.5 and I have had problems using vertical pictures due to the fact that a television uses horizontal I guess. I can resize the vertical pitcures and get them to full screen for my photo montage but they are distorted and the people look like they weigh about 100 pounds more than what they do. If I don't resize them the pics look normal but it has a black border on each side of it. Is there anyway around this execpt for cropping off the top and bottom of the picture which still doesn't work very well or only using horizontal pics for montages? The black border is okay, but I don't think it looks very professional. Any help with this will be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

[erayboul]

Any time that you resize a picture you need to resize both the horizontal and the vertical by the same proportions. In Photoshop, the setting is called "Constrain Proportions" under Image/Image Size. In Paint Shop Pro, I think it is called "Maintain aspect ratio". If you don't stretch both directions by the same amount, you will get distortion. Also, unless your photos already have a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio (depending on your final project's aspect ratio), then you will need to live with the black bars or perform some cropping.

[bulaman]

here is what I do. Open original picture in a photo editor and copy it. Open new file with 720x480 dimensions and paste into it. Edit picture to the size you want. I have a templete file that I use that has the safe margins in it. you can check out mine here Just paste you file into save as something else. Put the pasted picture's layer below the margins layer and resize to fit in the margins, then turn off the margins layer. Import the picture into premiere. You should be set, but if you have problems after you import it into premiere you need to tell it to maintaim the aspect ratio.

To maintain the original aspect ratio of a clip:

Select a clip in the Timeline and choose Clip > Video Options > Maintain Aspect Ratio.

To set the color for frame areas outside a clip with a maintained aspect ratio:

1 Select a clip in the Timeline.

2 Choose Clip > Video Options > Aspect Fill Color, specify a color (see Using the color picker), and click OK.


And that is that!

Enjoy