I'm creating some animation in AE CS3, all my work is created in Photoshop at the Pal Widescreen setting (I think 720x576 if I remember correctly).
Now what I wanted to create in terms of my output was a nice widescreen video, which I presumed was 16x9 so I selected that in my composition settings, as it was what I was lead to believe Pal Widescreen was.
When I imported my images and placed them in my comp, the images looked a little squashed but I toggled the little pixel aspect ration correction button underneath my comp window and it stretched it out to look exactly as I wanted, so I thought that my problem was solved.
When i came to render my video, I made sure everything was right (16x9 Widescreen in my output options) then after it had done rendering, I watched it in Quicktime and it just looked like a squashed 4x3. I Full Screen-ed it (I don't know why I thought this may help) but everything still looked terrible.
I have read everything related to pixel aspect ratio I can find in Adobe's LiveDocs site for AEcs3 and I also read the "understand pixel aspect ration" article that I found on the FAQ's page of this site's forum page (linked just below) and I hate to admit I don't feel that I understand it any better.
I changed my comp settings to Square pixel widescreen, after having read about it here:
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/pixel_madness/index.html
My pixel aspect ratio is now square pixels and my comp changed to the widescreen I wanted.
(Sorry if I'm providing too much detail but I want to make sure you know everything I did so I can be told at what stage I went wrong.)
I also read about interpreting footage, so I was smart enough to realise the images I had created in Photoshop for this project would be different to the composition settings I had now, so i interpreted the footage to the same as my comps (widescreen square pixel) and i rendered a few seconds of it just so i could get a watch of it in Quicktime and it is coming out widescreen EXACTLY as i wanted it, no longer the 'squashed to 4x3' screen it appeared to be before.
Have I done this correctly?
I'm not sure why I used Pal DV/ Widescreen, I think I got told in a workshop to always use it.
Also if anybody is feeling generous could they please explain the difference to me between square pixels and non square.
So far my understand is:
PAL D1/DV Widescreen = non square pixels, used for live video footage
PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixels = square pixels (obviously), used for motion graphics?
I know there are several other's but for the time being all I need to know about are those two.
Thanks in advance to anybody willing to help.
