16:9 Playback Issues

[DocD]

I have videos from my JVC Camcorder that are set on 16:9 resolution within the camera. When I play them back on VLC I have to manually change the video setting to 16:9 and then it looks fine. The problem is when I pull the file into Vegas or try to upload it to YouTube it comes out with the distorted video/scrunching.

Is there anyway to convert this video so that it looks right by default or can be uploaded?

Should I just change my camera back to normal setting and forget the 16:9 setting??

[jagabo]

It sounds like your camcorder uses a non 16:9 frame to encode a 16:9 picture. The video file includes a flag to tell the player that the video should be displayed as 16:9. For example, both 4:3 and 16:9 DVD use a 720x480 frame size (3:2) but include a flag that tells the DVD player which aspect ratio to display. Unfortunately, Youtube ignores aspect ratio flags. So you need to convert to a 16:9 frame size before uploading to Youtube.

[manono]

Unfortunately, Youtube ignores aspect ratio flags.

That's true, but you can apply a tag either while uploading or afterwards to have it play with the right aspect ratio:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146402

It might be useful for DocD if he still has some videos on YouTube with people looking way too tall and thin, or if he doesn't feel like doing a proper resize to them before uploading.

[edDV]

For Vegas, set project to NTSC DV Wide. Then right click on imported clips, select properties, then change aspect ratio to "NTSC DV Wide". You should see a 16x9 picture in the preview monitor.

When DVD encoding ("render as") make sure you select NTSC wide for aspect ratio. That results in a 16x9 DVD.

Square pixel export encoding should be set to ~848x480 with PAR = 1 (e.g for h.264 export for YouTube).