Video Appears Stretched

[sbgirling]

I am starting to get into this video thing and I have a couple general questions. I have a lot (25+) old 8mm tapes and am using a Sony Digital 8 camcorder (model 730) to capture the video using the firewire port.

I'm using MGI Videowave 5 (which I'm VERY happy with) to do the captures and editing/cleanup. When I "produce" the video I am choosing either the DV format (which save the files in compressed AVI format at 720x480 @ 29.97) or MPED-2 720x480 @ 29.97. When I watch the video the images appear to be slightly stretched compared to watching the images using the camcorder and tape. Is there any way to keep this from happening or is this just the way it is?

[KingJohn]

Your not maintaining the aspect ration, if you resize one dimension, you must resize the other proportionally. 720x480 it probably not correct when your source is different.

[sbgirling]

I'm looking at getting a DVD burner and it is my understanding that for the movie to be put on DVD it must be 720x480 so I guess I'm unsure how this would work. Is this a correct assumption?

[KingJohn]

Yes but you don't just change the size just to fit, it must be done proportionally, this sometimes gives you a border around the image, or sometimes it cuts part of the screen. But the resize should be done proportionally.

If for example the source was 720x480 then you have no problem, but if the source was 720x450 you cannot just change the 450 without proportionally changing the 720, if this adds black borders, then that's as best as you can do.

TMPGENc has a template for DVD's
DVD NTSC (MPEG-2 720x480 29.97fps CQ 65, Layer-2 48000Hz 384kbps)

You say you are capturing at 720X 480 so you should have no problems, but you must be doing something in the program to change the aspect ratio.