Maintaining Aspect Ratio in Premiere Pro

[sahill01]

In the middle of a pretty long wedding video and I'm scrolling tons of pictures with music behind but I have a problem. The picutres are huge in dimension and only a portion of the picture can be seen. It's almost like the picture is being zoomed. In Premiere 6.5 I could use the "maintain apect ration" function and everything was fine.

What is my problem here> How do I get the whole picture scaled down to where you can see it all on the screen?

Thanks

[daamon]

What is my problem here> How do I get the whole picture scaled down to where you can see it all on the screen?

Versions of Premiere prior to Pro took JPEGs and automatically scaled them to the project's resolution (e.g. 720 x 480 / 576 for NTSC / PAL).

The "Maintain Aspect Ratio" did exactly that if it was checked, else it would fit a picture to the screen by stretching and / or squashing it.

However, in Premiere Pro, JPEGs are displayed at the resolution of the original file - so a JPEG which is (say) 1600 x 1200 will be displayed at that resolution - giving you the apparent zoomed look you're describing.

You need to scale down your images - this is done as follows:

1) Place your first still on the timeline, and then place any other stills on the timeline too.

2) Set the first still's "Scale" in the "Motion" fixed effects to your desired percentage.

To scale down additional images:

3) Right click on the resized still (the one in the timeline) and select "Copy".

4) Select all the other stills to be adjusted: Click an unselected still, and Shift+Click the other stills to add more selections.

5) Right click on any one of these (now) selected stills and select "Paste Attributes".


Pick a percentage such that the image fits on the screen as you want it to.

Hope that helps...

[sahill01]

Daamon, thanks for the help bud. Worked perfectly.

It's incredible how much different Pro is from 6.5. It's gonna take some getting used to, that's for sure.

[mikiem]

FWIW... Knowledge base pdf at Adobe.com lists their preferred still sizes for use in video prog. Stills at 1:1 are usually converted on the timeline to 601 spec, causing some distortion, & you get the panning effect as default if too large. The adobe doc takes this into account for several video formats.

[daamon]

Daamon, thanks for the help bud. Worked perfectly.

No problem. Glad it was what you were after.

It's incredible how much different Pro is from 6.5. It's gonna take some getting used to, that's for sure.

I went from 6.0 to Pro 1.5 - and I'm glad I did. Yes, there's some obvious differences, but definitely for the better. The main one I took a little while to get used to was the removal of the A/B timeline.

Apparently, Pro 1.0 and onwards was completely re-written from scratch, rather than just building on from previous versions.

A great site for forums and tutorials is: www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial - well worth checking out! Have fun...