ALRIGHT THATS IT!!!!!!!!

[HLT]

Got your attention? Sorry....

Honestly though im frustrated. Here's the bottom line: Im using Premier 6.0 and TMPGenc and all i (dammit hell) want is to (dammit hell) import a bunch of pictures and have them look like they SHOULD look on the resulting MPG file. Thats all!

As several people have pointed out, TMPGenc or Premier (or both) add black bars to each of the photos and squish the width of the photos abnormally.

I've seen lengthy threads on this, but I don't see solutions being offered up. Just a bunch of arguing about 4:3 ratio. Or people telling me to manually crop all my images to 4:3.

Cmon folks...

There's absolutely no reason why these programs can't adjust to fit the television screen and keep the picture's width correct. Thats all I ask.

There must be a way to do this. There is no way in hell im going to believe that everyone who does a photo slideshow just accepts their images being squished 20%.

What settings must be set in Premier and what settings must be set in TMPGenc to avoid the annoying "Squishing black bars"?

Lets settle this once and for all.

HLT!

[gitreel]

the reason is most of the sources are in letterbox. if you convert to 4:3, you will lose about 1/3 of the picture. When encoding adjust your source.

[ghosty6]

Use proshow Gold and you will not have this problem.

Right Tool for the job.

[presto]

I hope you don't mind my adding a suggestion that is not exactly what you asked for. Just ignore this if you have to use premier for some reason.

Try the free trial of Memories On TV. It makes gorgeous slideshows where the "camera" pans across the pictures to make them seem more alive. You can control every aspect of the slide show manually or set it to automatic.

Or If you have to use Premier there is a great free program called Irfanview that (I'm prettys sure) can batch crop all those photos for you. Of course you have to hope that the subjects are all toward the center of the pic and the edges are not important.

[gitreel]

Use proshow Gold and you will not have this problem.

Right Tool for the job.

That is not true. Using any program, if you go from letterbox or widescreen to 4:3, you lose part of the picture. Hit the zoom button on your dvd player if you don't believe me. The sides are chopped off and the middle is blown up.

[HLT]

Ok maybe im mssing something here, but im not *losing* part of the picture.

An image that is landscape oriented will be squished by 20%. Meaning people look long and tall in it, abnormally. Black sidebars are added.

An image that is vertically oriented will automatically have black bars (as it should) but additional black space is added again squishing the image by 20% and making people long and tall.

Doing a photo slideshow on DVD to music has to be the most common thing done for DVD authoring. Its hardly a rare unique type of project. These programs should ahve some way to make the picture look like the picture.

Nothing is getting cut off at the top or bottom or sides at all.

HLT

[gitreel]

you are wrong. the picture more than likely was shot in 16:9 format. Hence, the black bars. If you convert to 4:3, you do lose part of the picture. I suggest you do more research, before making statements like that. People will make fun of you. If you want it in full screen, go buy it that way. That is why if you rent or buy a movie and it says it has been formatted to fit your screen, they have converted it and you lost part of the image. Like I said before, hit zoom on your dvd player. You will see.... That is the same thing. The process is called pan & scan.

[HLT]

A LANDSCAPE ORIENTED PHOTO IN THE PREMIER VIEWING WINDOW WHILE THE IMAGE IS ON THE TIMELINE LOOKS PERFECT. YES THERE IS A LITTLE BIT OF BLACK ON THE SIDES BUT THE IMAGE IS THE CORRECT "SHAPE".



THE SAME IMAGE WHILE ENCODING IN TMPGENC. AS YOU CAN SEE AT LEAST 10% ADDITIONAL BLACK SPACE IS ADDED ON BOTH SIDES AND THE IMAGE IS ABNORMALLY SHRUNK.



A VERTICALLY ORIENTED PHOTO THAT SHOULD HAVE SOME BLACK BARS TO FILL THE EMPTY SPACE. VIEWING IN PREMIER. IT HAS THE APPROPRIATE AMOUNT OF BLACK BAR AND THE IMAGE IS NOT SQUISHED BY 20%. LOOKS FINE.



THE SAME IMAGE WHILE ENCODING IN TMPGENC. AGAIN THE BLACK SPACE IS THERE BUT IT ADDS MORE BLACK SPACE ON THE SIDES FURTHER SQUISHING THIS IMAGE ABNORMALLY.



HLT

[gitreel]

select full screen, keep aspect ratio. That should fix it

[ghosty6]

gitreel, I have been doing slideshows for a long time.

I am currently using Vegas 5 to do this, however for someone to make a simple slideshow that will work correctly without getting into the world of heavy duty video editing, I suggest proshow golg.

As for the missing parts of the picture, you might be confusing TV overscan(safe area) with croping.

Proshow gold will NOT cut off any part of the picture, it resize correctly according the Aspect ratio you want 4:3 or 16:9 no need to crop the source(unless you want to fill the entire screen).

[HLT]

select full screen, keep aspect ratio. That should fix it

No change whatsoever. Full screen (keep aspect ratio) is selected. The images are still squished artificially.

Try it yourself. Im convinced there must be some other incorrect setting I have set right now.

Can anyone assist going by the above pictures?

Thanks

[Defcon]

I would recommend using Video Fantascape, much easier....

[gitreel]

Try it yourself. Im convinced there must be some other incorrect setting I have set right now.

I have. I have encoded hundreds of movies using TMPGenc, so whats your point? I was just trying to help.

[HLT]

I have. I have encoded hundreds of movies using TMPGenc, so whats your point. I was just trying to help.

Obviously your suggestion did not fix the problem, so im asking to look at your other settings and tell me which ones I might need to adjust on my end. The attitude isn't necessary.

Its not my fault your first suggestion (after telling me im dumb and will be made fun of) did not fix the problem. Can you see if there are some other suggestions that might work?

HLT

[ghosty6]

I have encoded hundreds of movies using TMPGenc, so whats your point?

Encoding movies and creating slideshows using various size photo's are two different animals

[gitreel]

you could try no margin, keep aspect ratio. I apologize. I was just trying to help, You got off track when you said moving from 16:9 to 4:3 you wouldn't lose anything. Anyway no harm, no foul

[HLT]

Ok this is really weird. In TMPGenc I went up to "Option" and then "Preview Option" and it was set to "Fix to 320x240".

Randomly I changed this to "Do not fix preview size" and the preview window became very large on the screen.

Simultaneously the image looked proportionate. It still had black sidebars but the image wasn't abnormally squished. Here is a comparison between the two:



AND AFTER CHANGING THE PREVIEW



It looks like this is just a preview "BUG" (and yes im calling it a bug, why the hell would they make the default preview totally screw up the way the pictures look? Sigh).

Apparently when you dont limit the proportions of the preview, it resizes it to be like a real television screen and everything looks fine.

Lets see if it still looks good when on the TV...

HLT

[gitreel]

you could even try to adjust the source ratio to 1:1(also known as vga)

That might work.

[NoodleMaps]

Right click the image on the Premiere Timeline and select maintain aspect radio. You can also go into the image settings in one of the preferences and change it to always maintain aspect. If this is not the answer you are looking for, I'm sorry. But this what I grasped from your original post.

[guns1inger]

I don't trust anyone but me to do my resizing for me. If I am setting up a slide show, I will crop/resize/process my stills in Photoshop first, to ensure they are the correct resolution/aspect ratio to begin with, then import them into whatever package I am using. This way I know there will be no issues with the package screwing them up.

btw, DVD Lap does a pretty good job with slideshows

[HLT]

Alright.

Here is the final word on the black bar issue.

Ignore them.

Make sure your TMPGenc / Additional Settings / Advanced and video tab ... have "Full Screen (keep aspect ratio)" selected, make sure 4:3 NTSC is your ratio selected and just completely ignore the black bars you see when its encoding.

I have no freaking clue why TMPGenc adds them in and actually distorts the image, but it does. If you do what I did above and uncheck the preview size restriction, it will stop squishing the images ... however ... when its done and you have your MPG ... they're going to look squished again.

Ignore this too.

Just burn your DVD and you'll see the images are fine.

These programs have a long ways to go. I wasted a good week and several hours of struggling over this for a very very basic need. Even when it was fixed the programs don't reflect that its fixed. They still show something wrong.

Just ignore it and burn your DVD and you should be fine.

Alls well that ends well? Thanks everyone for your help.

HLT