Vegas incorrectly interpreting aspect ratio of .WMV file

[sanlyn]

Te original image is somewhere around 1.6:1 in a 16z8 letterbox frame, if the the original post is anything to go by. You can't fill a 1.777778:1 screen with a 1.6:1 image without distorting the image or resizing+cropping it.

[hello_hello]

Melodious, you should summarize exactly what you did so that someone else might benefit from this thread in the future.

I'm really confused now because the OP's screen shots of "the problem" are different. If the PAR was fakkakted why wasn't the image squashed?

I still say what he has is a 16X9 image baked into a 4:3 frame.

This is how the original wmv looks at 4:3. It looks vertically stretched to me.

what was the pixel aspect ratio being displayed when you first opened the video properties? Was it 1:1 or something else? I'm just curious as to what was going wrong in the first place.

The clip he posted was a 5:3 (1.66:1) aspect ratio image letterboxed in a 720x480 frame with DV pixels 0.91:1

I too am curious whether that was his original source.

I guess I'm lost as I'm not understand where you're getting that from.

5:3



16:9

[budwzr]

This shot doesn't match what the Ope posted as a sample of the "problem", though I opened it in Vegas Pro 12 and it didn't look like that. You probably have the player window size different than what's being displayed. In Vegas it only has letterbox, no pillars. AND is 16X9ish shaped.

[hello_hello]

This shot doesn't match what the Ope posted as a sample of the "problem", though I opened it in Vegas Pro 12 and it didn't look like that. You probably have the player window size different than what's being displayed. In Vegas it only has letterbox, no pillars.

Yeah, I did. I opened the sample wmv and told MPC-HC to use a 4:3 aspect ratio. Hence it adding the pillarboxes. It's just the way it decided to resize it to 4:3. I'm sure if you crop the pic to remove the player window and the side borders, what's left will be 4:3. It doesn't look correct at 4:3 to me though.
(When I cropped the above image I missed by a couple of pixels but it's definitely 4:3. The resolution is 640x478)



I didn't pay much attention to the pic in the original post myself. I just went be the actual video sample. Who knows what was being done to the aspect ratio when the original screenshot was taken.

[budwzr]

Yeah, I get it. This whole thread is a wash now. I must of D/L a different version or something. Hahaha.

[sanlyn]

The wmv sample sure looks like 4:3 to me. And the circle in the opening logo on the wmv link is a circle, not an egg. So I don't know what the O.P. is working with. Another caution to work with source, not with (maybe) altered video. MediaInfo sez the wmv link posted in 720x480 @ @ 3:2. I'll wager that 3:2 is not the correct DAR, or it would be slightly stretched that way.

[hello_hello]

I guess we'll need to agree to disagree, because the sample looks more likely to be correct at 3:2 than at 4:3 to me.

I'm not sure why the "circle" in the opening logo is necessary a circle, plus assuming the wma sample is an exact replica of the video the OP was given to work with, he's been given a video which was created by someone else. If they didn't manage to get the 720x480 4:3 aspect ratio correct when creating the video, who's to say they resized the opening credits correctly? Or maybe the credits were correctly resized if the assumption was 4:3, but they got the rest of it wrong. Who knows.....
If you take the actual image (as I did a couple of posts ago) remove the black bars and resize it to 5:3 as you suggested, it looks wrong to me. Unless of course the person in the video does have a football shaped head.....

[sanlyn]

No, I agree: something is wrong with the image in that frame as posted. The images I posted are what things would look like at 4:3 cropped and -> 16x9. What the logo really looks is anyone's guess. But if you look at the pixel ratio as NTSC-DV (5:3, or 10:11), the guy looks"normal". I can't figure out if the speaker is Tom Jennings from Arkansas or Tom Jennings from Pennsylvania, but if you want 16x9 full screen you have to play around with that wmv. The wmv IMO is screwed up.

[El Heggunte]

To whom this may interest



Also,

http://www.wfca.org/

so it's unlikely that the circle is not a circle

[sanlyn]

Looks like a circle to me, and on their websites as well -- which I found a while back. Notebthe bvideo on their front page is a letterboxed video inside a 1.27:1 frame.

[jagabo]

The titles were created differently than video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHPgMqccFUA

The Youtube video and Melodius' WMV (inset), both interpreted as square pixel:

[budwzr]

That video is horrendous. Someone can get a grand for making that?

[Melodious]

Melodious,
Out of curiosity, what was the pixel aspect ratio being displayed when you first opened the video properties? Was it 1:1 or something else? I'm just curious as to what was going wrong in the first place.

When I first checked the video properties, the PAR was 0.9091. I changed it to 1.0 (square).

In getting the video to look like your 16:9 sample, this is what I did:

1. Open Vegas
2. Create video project using template "NTSC DV Widescreen (720x480, 29.970 fps)"
3. Insert "Tom" media
4. Right click media in timeline, select "Properties"
5. Open media tab
6. Change "Pixel aspect ratio" from "0.9091 (NTSC)" to "1.0000 (Square)"
7. Click Ok
8. Click "Event Pan/Crop" on media in timeline
9. Uncheck "Lock Aspect Ratio"
10. Change "Height" value from "480" to "396"

That seemed to do the trick. This is the resulting display in Vegas preview:

[Melodious]

To everyone asking, the wmv in the OP is verbatim what I received from the printing company. One year they sent me .FLV files. Can you believe that?

[El Heggunte]

To everyone asking, the wmv in the OP is verbatim what I received from the printing company.

Yes, and the one(s) who transformed the original video into that pesky WMV were unusually stupid on that day

One year they sent me .FLV files.

Argh

[jagabo]

By the way, these videos are no doubt copyrighted by the WFCA. Are you sure you're allowed to use them?

[Melodious]

To everyone asking, the wmv in the OP is verbatim what I received from the printing company.

Yes, and the one(s) who transformed the original video into that pesky WMV were unusually stupid on that day

One year they sent me .FLV files.

Argh

The amateur videographers (probably friends or business colleagues of the WFCA) probably used windows media maker or something equally crappy. I don't think any of them are technologically up to snuff.

[Melodious]

By the way, these videos are no doubt copyrighted by the WFCA. Are you sure you're allowed to use them?

So yea... how do I go about getting this thread deleted?

[sanlyn]

When I first checked the video properties, the PAR was 0.9091. I changed it to 1.0 (square).

Nope. It's 0.9091.

..............

That seemed to do the trick.

Tommy looks fat, the same way he looked in the 16x9 sample I posted. And the circle in your your logo is stretched (it's not stretched anywhere on WCFA's website in their images or videos). The WMV looks more like a 16x9 image in a 720x480 frame. The WMV is encoded with no display aspect ratio.

If you crop off the top and bottom pixels alone, the result is 720x396 or so. that's a 1.8:1 image. Close to 1.77778:1, of course, but everything is still stretched. Tommy will be a wide guy just like the guy I posted earlier in post #29.

If you cut off top/bottom pixels and side pillars as well, you get an image that is 1.666:1. That AR wouldn't be correct either, IMO.

So tell the truth, I have no idea what the rocket scientists did with that WMV.

[jagabo]

When I first checked the video properties, the PAR was 0.9091. I changed it to 1.0 (square).

Nope. It's 0.9091.

It looks like square pixel to me. Look at the picture in post #41.

[sanlyn]

It looks like square pixel to me. Look at the picture in post #41.

Hmm. You'er absolutely correct. It's that logo that kept throwing me off. See my post #29: my final output images are correct (except for the logo), but my idea about having to resize the original from 4:3 DAR wasn't. I was right about Tommy being a pretty hefty guy (let's hope Tommy agrees). The guy speaking is a 16:9 image at 1:1 pixel ratio in a 720X480 letterboxed frame. But the logo isn't a 1:1 image: it's a .90 image in a 720x480 frame, and that logo was originally a 4:3 image. So that means Vegas was correct, as far as the opening frames go.

So if you take the guy talking and remove the letterbox, then resize that 1:1 speaker to a 16x9 image, then what Melodious sees in Vegas in post #43 (top image) is the same thing I posted in post #29 (bottom image):

[Attachment 21141 - Click to enlarge]

[Attachment 21142 - Click to enlarge]

But the logo should be processed separately. Using Melodious method, the client's logo will be distorted:

[Attachment 21143 - Click to enlarge]

[budwzr]

So that means Vegas was correct, ...

That's what I was saying earlier. All the Ope needed to do was use the crop tool to eliminate the letterbox. See smrpix post #23.

Sanlyn, you're out, smrpix, you're in

[sanlyn]

Vegas was correct about the pixel ratios. based on the leading frames. That logo shot is a 4:3 image encoded at 0.9:1 PAR. That's how Vegas ended up with letterbox + pillars (i.e, a DAR 4:3 image).

You're both fired.

[budwzr]

Yo momma wears monkey boots

[sanlyn]

Interesting weekend of playing with a piece of garbage in that sample tom-jennings-6-the -home-field-advantage-546.wmv. Whoever made it is collecting undeserved pay as a "pro", giving bad press to the term when real pros toil away to get decent results. The wmv has images from 3 different aspect ratios: a corporate logo that's nowhere near 16:9, titles in a 720X48 frame that display correctly only at 1:1.....and in a 16x9 letterboxed frame, a 16x9 image with the same block noise, banding, and low-bitrate artifacts you see from VHS that's gone through multiple encodes. Definition is so poor and noisy that the speaker's lapels disappear and shift every time he moves. It has apparently been resized without being denoised or deinterlaced (!). If you deinterlace, denoise, and resize, there's not much video left. This is "pro" work? IMO, not.

The logo appears to be borrowed from wfca's website videos. It's really a ~1.28:1 image stretched to 720x480. It looks correct only when resized to 600x336 (!) and displayed at 1:1 DAR.

[Attachment 21179 - Click to enlarge]

The logo,titles, and speaking segments were all reprocessed separately in Avisynth to get the correct ratios. It's a shame the speaker's segment in the source is such a horrible mess to begin with. That the video might be intended for tiny-screen display is no excuse, IMHO. Even the audio sucks royally (and it was the wrong sampling rate); apparently distorted by whoever created the original dissolves and transitions. I worked without audio, adding it later. The attached mkv is edited down to 1min 3sec, with a horizontal wipe about halfway thru.

Interesting, the way some "pro"s work.

[poisondeathray]

By the way, these videos are no doubt copyrighted by the WFCA. Are you sure you're allowed to use them?

So yea... how do I go about getting this thread deleted?

You would have to PM the head honcho baldrick. He can make things magically disappear....
https://forum.videohelp.com/members/311-Baldrick

[budwzr]

Yeah, I told those guys up there to calm down, but all went to hell in a hand basket. And I just counted 47 screen shots from Sanlyn alone!

[sanlyn]

[

So yea... how do I go about getting this thread deleted?

Or you can just delete the linked video.

[Melodious]

As we await an answer, can I ask you what software you used to adjust the video? I have such little time to assure the printing press owner that I can do this correctly before she ends up consulting a company that does video work.

I kind of just did it manually, working out the correct aspect ratio (based on the assumption the wmv is 3:2) and the picture inside is roughly 16:9 once the black bars are removed, then I used MeGUI and Avisynth to encode it, but that would take a new (long) thread to explain.

Edit: Well I was slow and you seem to have it sorted. I'd attached another sample to this post originally, but I think it'd confuse the issue at this stage (it was confusing me) so I deleted it.

The owner has seen the 16:9 DVD and now strongly prefers doing a 4:3 DVD. It's her understanding that the "resolution" will look better if the video doesn't fill the screen. Just as you said:

It may only look more blurry because it gets resized (enlarged) more on playback if the monitor/TV is 16:9.

I followed your steps on how to make the video fit into a 4:3 DVD. But the 30 pixels of black bars that I added to the top and bottom are darker than the ones that were baked into the original video. So there are two shades of black/grey on the letterbox. It looks unprofessional. This is using Vegas. Could you give me a step by step process on using AVI synth to reprocess this video for 4:3 and then encode it into a high quality format that Vegas accepts (not mkv)?

Thanks

[jagabo]

Crop the original black bars away. Then let Vegas add letterbox bars.