Help with editing and exporting MPEG2 with Adobe Premiere

[cpuwiz]

I've been experiencing a problem recently that has me stumped. This old forum post pretty much sums up exactly what the problem is, but there are no replies that answer to the issue.

I have many MPEG2 home video clips that I've captured with my Creative VB Digital VCR card. I've already used Womble MPEG-VCR to cut and trim them as needed and now for a few of them, I'd like to add some transitions and title effects before burning as SVCD. The problem is that when I export the final project to MPEG2 (or even save them as AVI) with Premiere, the resulting clip is squished up, significantly narrower than the source MPEG2.

I've used the STOIK Video Converter to convert the source MPEG2 to AVI, just as a test, and the resulting AVI is just fine. However, that same source MPEG2 saved as AVI from Premiere is squished, as I desribed before. I thought about just using STOIK to convert all the source MPEG2 to AVI, but a 6MB source (which I've been testing with) ~ 85MB AVI. For my source MPEG2 that are 650MB, the resulting AVI would be unmanageable and enormous.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mec_modifier]

Hmm...The only thing I can thing of is to check your mpegs and see if they are the same screen resolution as your project setting...if the mpegs are a different size, some squishing might occur.

As for the AVI's being monstrous in size, welcome to the biggest drawback of the .avi.....kinda makes me wanna go Mac

[Richard_G]

It all depends on what size the original is. If you have clips in 1/2 D1 for instance (352 x 480 NTSC or 352 x 576 PAL), some players will stretch horizontally and show as full screen, others will display exactly what you have. I suspect that Premiere is displaying what you have, it is an editing program after all and shouldn't be doing anything to the video that you haven't told it to do (I use Mediastudio Pro and that does the same). Media player and the like assume that you want full screen so distort the image. You say that the clips display fine if they are in avi format, are you using the same player to view them? Even if you are using the same player, it might be that it handles avi clips differently to mpeg.

Despite this, I suspect that if you burn the squished files to SVCD, they will play perfectly.