how to change a mov aspect ratio with quicktime?

[vato76]

I have a mov thats at 3:2 AR and it looks squished. I want to fix it to 4:3 but i cant figure out how to do it in quicktime pro. Can someone guide me through the process or is there another program that can do it without converting? thanks

[Cornucopia]

How do you know it's 3:2 AR right now? Are you using QT to tell you? QT is notorious for using the wrong/non-standard nomenclature. To verify, open your file in MediaInfo and show us the text readout.

Now, about QT...

Open your movie in QTPro.
Go to [Window | Show Movie Properties] (usually Ctrl+J).
You should usually see 3 "tracks" listed: the MOV container itself, the Video Track, and the Audio Track (YMMV, depending upon your file).
Go to the MOV container track.
Select the [Presentation] tab.
The Conform Aperture checkbox defaults to CHECKED and set to "Clean Aperture".
If you want to see what is truly stored in the movie, with NO AR adjustment used at all (aka showing as 1:1 PAR), change the setting to "Encoded Pixels".
Now, Go back to the Video Track.
Select the [Visual Settings] tab.
The Transformation section shows the Normal vs. Display size, and whether the Aspect Ratio is being preserved (checkbox).
You can go back and forth between this section+tab and the MOV section+tab listed above to see how QT can have it's split personality.
And then you can decide more confidently how to force QT to work the way you want it to work.
Obviously, if you get it the way you want it, you can do a [SAVE] and it should (losslessly) save the movie with the adjusted settings. I don't know whether it will revert back to the defaults for the next movie you use, however.

Hope that helps,

Scott

[vato76]

yeah i was using mediainfo.

thanks for the guide but i gave up on qt. i used your instructions but the result was always crappy. doing it your way the result AR would never change because the normal size was the same as the display size. and even by putting in a different value the saved file would still come out lower quality. so then i tried another way - export/options/size. i picked the first 4:3 and it took like an hour to save and the result was a bigger file with a lower quality image.

so i said **** it. i just used mkvmerge and it worked well enough. thanks anyway scott.