botti opened this issue on Mar 06, 2001 ยท 10 posts
petercat posted Tue, 06 March 2001 at 3:46 PM
Hmm, but I think the squeezing is just a visual effect -- the pixels are still square, not rectangular as used by DV. So if it's stretched out in conversion, you'll end up with less resolution. It's a hardware issue... computer pixels are square, video pixels are rectangular (0.888:1 pixel aspect ratio). I know for DV tape the frame resolution is 720 by 480. This is for non-letterboxed, 4:3 frame aspect ratio video; on a TV screen the 720 pixels are squeezed into the same width 640 pixels occupy on a computer screen of identical size. So you'd still need to render at 720 to avoid losing horizontal resolution. I would try setting the camera X scale to 88.88%, rendering at 720 by 480, saving as an uncompressed QuickTime movie, and using QuickTime Pro to convert the result to DV Stream format. (N.B. I know this would work on Mac, and presume QuickTime Pro for Windows can do the same conversion.) On a computer screen, the frame would look stretched, but once converted to video it would look normal. For real widescreen, find out what resolution is needed (in pixels) and render to that resolution. You'll have to figure out a compensation for the camera X scale, based on the aspect ratio of the pixel, not the frame. It may look stretched out on a computer monitor, but on DVD it should be correct.