Widescreen editing / capture confusion

[visualmagic]

Ok, where do I begin? I feel like an idiot for asking what I hope will be an easy question to answer, but I cant find the correct threads that have answered this, so here goes. Any help would be exceptionally appreciated.

For 10 years now I have been video editing for broadcast television in a regional area, happily and with no dramas.

Sure enough, recently the 'widescreen' infiltration has began, and I have chosen to avoid looking at it, continuing to edit on my outdated DC30+ PCI card, and nevertheless producing sufficient results with no complaints.

Recently a client has asked me to edit for him a video, however he primarily wants it to play in an art gallery on a plasma TV - widescreen.

My Premiere 5.1 has no setting for widescreen, and my 6.0 does, but still says 720x576 (PAL setting).

My cameraman does not have a switchable camera, so shoots in this resolution, but I figure that since what he has shot is chromakey, I can get around stretching the picture.

Most of the background is floating graphics so it should all be easy but I am really confused.

How do I edit in widescreen?

If widescreen is simply normal resolution stretched then why doesnt everything on telly look stretched?

How do I edit this project? Do I still work in 720x576 in Photoshop and Premiere? Or should it be something else, like 1080 x 576? for example?

I cant believe this is so hard. Surely there is an easy explanation.

Please help. Please. Please Please.

[daamon]

Hi visualmagic,

I think I'm right in saying that widescreen DV is still 720 x 576, but that the pixel aspect ratio is different.

When this is shown on a normal TV, you get the black bars or a "squashed" picture, but when the footage is shown on a widescreen TV the fitting of the footage to the screen (done by the TV) results in a full picture, no black bars.

I've edited widescreen DV that was shot on a Canon XM2 in widescreen mode. The resultant DV AVI shows as 720 x 576, but Premiere Pro 1.5 displays it as widescreen in the monitor window.

I then frameserve to my MPEG2 encoder (TMPGEnc Plus, configured for widescreen) and the resultant DVD plays fine on widescreen.

I hope that helps...

P.S. Upgrade to Premiere Pro 1.5 - I used to use 6.0 and Pro 1.5 is much better...

[visualmagic]

Thankyou, so I guess this means that I should edit within a widescreen project.

What do I do about stretched pics, graphics etc, that have been made in a 720x576 Photoshop page? Is this simply to be expected? Or should I make the Photoshop template differently?

Cheers, any help is really appreciated.

[Red Barchetta]

Wide screen or High Definition?
HD I know is a totally different pixel setting (as well as aspect ratio) - but simple wide-screen, I pretty sure is just a case of using a ration of 16:9 instead of 4:3

[daamon]

What do I do about stretched pics, graphics etc, that have been made in a 720x576 Photoshop page? Is this simply to be expected? Or should I make the Photoshop template differently?

I'm not sure of the exact answer, but I shall relay my experience and hope that it's a guide / clue to the correct answer...

I was doing a wedding video recently, shot in 16:9 widescreen and transferred to DV AVI on my PC. The resolution was still 720 x 576, but the pixel aspect ratio was different to that of 4:3 DV AVI, although the latter was still 720 x 576.

I wanted to create a background in Bluff Titler, so I set it up as DVD standard 720 x 576 thinking it'd be OK. I exported to DV AVI using the Panasonic DV Codec. All OK so far...

When I opened this in the Premiere Pro 1.5 monitor window (in widescreen shape), it showed as 4:3 and had a black border to both left and right, whereas the wedding footage filled the full widescreen monitor window.

I got around this by doing my background in Bluff Titler as 1024x576 and saving to uncompressed AVI. I couldn't use DV AVI as the Panasonic DV Codec didn't like the resolution - which is understandable. I got the 1024 for 16:9 by doing (576 / 9) * 16 = 1024. The 768 in 768x576 for 4:3 is derived the same way: (576 / 3) * 4 = 768.

When this 1024x576 AVI was viewed in the monitor window, it looked widescreen and worked perfectly.

I know this is a long explanation leading to a simple "try doing things as 1024 x 576", but I wanted to give the background so you, and others, could understand why.

Hope that helps...