Widescreen Aspect Ratio

[IceAged]

Hi all

 

I am working on a promotional DVD showing a series of animations in both 4:3 and 16:9 format.

 

The 4:3 animations have been rendered using the ‘PAL (video)’ output size, width 728, height 576, pixel aspect ratio 1.0. (The image aspect ratio is 1.333).

 

I see that there are no presets for 16:9 widescreen, other than the ‘HDTV (video)’ setting. My question is this – using the standard widescreen image aspect ratio of 1.778, what dimensions should I use for the width and height, and what should I set the pixel aspect ratio too?

 

The end result will be edited in Adobe Premiere, outputted as MPEG2 and AVI files for sending to clients, and for use on the promotional DVD. So I’d like to get this right from the outset!

 

Any suggestions..?

[david.jones]

Normally as far as i understand it aspect ratio in widescreen is purely derived from pixel aspect.

 

I assume you will be using PAL, so all you need to do is still render to 720x576 but use a pixel aspect ratio of 1.42

 

Hope this helps. These presets can actually be found in adobe after effects and premier, so look into that too.

[dbarc]

If you're outputting for TV, the 4x3 stuff should be pixel aspect ratio 1:1.067, not square.

 

Re rendering widescreen - The trouble is the animation will look squashed on a normal telly - As a compromise we tend to render to pixel aspect ratio 1:1.067 and 720x432 so that the image is effectively widescreen ratio on a 4x3 telly (with black bands top and bottom) Then on a widescreen TV, it will generally automatically zoom vertically to keep the image at the correct proportion. The way commercial movie DVDs work is to contain two versions of the film, one rendered for 4x3 the other for widescreen, and the DVD player automatically detects which one it needs to play.. but I've never done this (or know how to do it I'm afraid!)

[IceAged]

Thanks guys

The majority of my animations will be watched on a computer monitor, so I guess they should be using square pixels, right? What I don’t understand is the widescreen issue – if I am using square pixels then surely I should be rendering wider than 720x576? (As opposed to adjusting the pixel aspect ratio to make the image wider)

I have always assumed that a widescreen image is physically larger than a standard 4:3 image… And therefore rendered a larger, wider image by changing the width and height settings, keeping the image aspect at 1.78 but leaving the pixel aspect at 1.

Is this the right approach?

[david.jones]

Yeah, im no genius with this, but I am sure the best way is to use whatever ratio you want for viewing on a pc, and like you say, use a square pixel ratio.

 

If you do that, and then want to produce a dvd, with a widescreen ratio, this can be achieved in you compositing software, premier or whatever anyway, as dvd authoring software will require input video in the PAL ratio i described before, premier can stretch pixel ratio aspects depending on what setting you create for your composition.

 

Render it out widescreen, and square pixels, use premier to change various versions depending on the media it is for, pc viewing or dvd authoring.

[dbarc]

Render it out widescreen, and square pixels, use premier to change various versions depending on the media it is for, pc viewing or dvd authoring.

 

This sounds good to me, the only problem being that you'll need to render at 1024 x 576 not 720 using this method otherwise your animation is going to look horribly stretched on a widescreen telly (or even an ordinary telly for that matter). Render 1024 x 576 and Premiere will automatically convert down to 720 x 576 maintaining the proportion (and quality) of the original. I hope that makes sense!

[IceAged]

Thanks guys

Appologies for not replying sooner. It doesn't seem like there is a defintive way to do this, other than what works best on an individual basis.

I'm trying out everything suggested here - thanks again for all your help