Need Help stopping After Effects from Stretching 16x9

[cleosith]

Hi, this is my first post, so I apologize if this has been covered in the past.

My problem is straightforward. I am trying to put a demo reel together of work Ive done that can be displayed on widescreen TV's or any DVD software like PowerDVD.

I am ripping shots from DVD's with DVD Decrypter/Cinematize. The videos I am bringing into After Effects are uncompressed quicktimes with the following attributes: 1.78:1, 720x405. It is my understanding this is 16x9 footage. When I bring the video into AE and render it as a MPEG-2 DVD format I get an extremely stretched image. I have gone into the composition settings and tried NTSC .9, Widescreen 1.2, and I have switched the MPEG-2 codec options from 4:3 to 16x9. In each test, the video is always stretched, just to different degrees depending on the options Ive changed.

Can anyone please help me figure this out? I should mention, I preview the rendered MPEG-2 file in PowerDVD and Nero Show, and both show the same stretched image. Ive been playing with different software (VirtualDub, Cinematize, Decrypter) for over a week now and havent been able to figure this out. I find the resolution and aspect ratio discussion very confusing.

Thanks a lot!

[Baldrick]

720x405? Don't you mean 720x480. Could you post some screenshots on the uncompressed quicktime? as I have no idea what cinematize does to do the picture.

Remember also that 16:9 mpegs might look stretched if the player doesn't resize them to 16:9 correctly.

[cleosith]

Thanks for responding. AE definitely sees the video as 720x404 (not 405). I cant submit a screenshot yet cause I am still at work. I will tonight. From reading other posts and web sites, I thought this was normal as it is 16:9.

[cleosith]

Oh I forgot to ask. Why wouldnt PowerDVD display the video properly? Doesnt it auto detect that sort of thing?

[Baldrick]

Pixel Aspect Ratio(PAR) and Display Aspect Ratio(DAR) can cause a lot of headache... . Read http://www.artbeats.com/pub/articles/aspect_ratio_1.pdf , it also has some help for after effects.

I seems that cinematize resizes the 16:9 DVD to a 16:9 frame size with 1:1 DAR. But I don't use AE and don't know how to configure it.

[Cornucopia]

There is an Aspect Ratio setting in Cinematize which was probably set wrong. It's default is "Automatic" and should detect and set correctly, but maybe it can't with your source.

Force it to manual 16:9, but maintain the 720x480NTSC(or 576PAL) framesize of the original. Then re-export.

Make sure your AE Pixel Aspect Ratio is correct. It may look stretched tall in the preview, but if it is being encoded to MPEG2, as long as you have the 16:9 anamorphic flag set, this is to be expected.

Scott

[cleosith]

Hi Conrucopia,

That really could be my problem.....not setting cinematize right. I'll look at that tonight. But when you say make sure my AE pixel aspect ratio is correct, what should that be set to? 1.78, or .9, or 1.2?

Sorry for asking you to spell it out for me, but a little more info would be much appreciated!

[Cornucopia]

In AE, you want

[New Composition | Aspect Ratio : "D1/DV NTSC Widescreen" (1.2 PAR)]

It explains it in the help file...

Scott

[cleosith]

Thanks a lot! I'll give it a shot tonight and let you know

[cleosith]

Hi guys,

I worked on this last night and have in fact solved my problems thanks to your input! Cinematize WAS in fact outputting the files incorrectly. But more even when I got it to output at 720x480 it still came into AE super stretched. I messed with the composition settings with no luck. I went back to Cinematize and changed the codec, which turned out to be the real problem. I was using 4:2:2 Uncompressed. I have no idea what that was doing to the images but once I changed to Mpeg-4 or Photo-Jpeg it would come into AE just fine.

Thanks a lot!