Re: Text with pixel Aspect Ratio Correction

[Chris Anderson] "I saw a demo where they made circle graphic with PAR off and it looked fine though the video was squeezed horizontally, but when PAR was turned on the video looked normal 16x9 but the new circle graphic was stretched horizontally.
However, when the circle was created with PAR on, it now looked fine and was of course squeezed like the rest of the image when PAR was turned off."

that shouldn't happen normally... i'm not sure how they went about making the circle though...

normally, ae (and photoshop) handles the par correction, discrepancies and conversions fairly well, and i've never had a problem with text. but there are some pitfalls...

for example, create a ntsc d1 widescreen comp with par correction on and then create a new solid that is 200x200. it looks square and common sense says 200x200 is square, but try rotating the solid 90 degrees. now it looks like a rectangle. that's because with a 1.2 par it is really 167x200.

however, you could create a new solid, make it 200x200, but set the solid to have a square par. rotate that 90 degrees and it still looks like a square.

you can easily avoid an issue like this if you worked in a ntsc d1 widescreen square pixel comp setting. the only pitfall you have there is if you have non square material, ae needs to be correctly interpreting that material as it's correct par so that it will look correct in the square pixel comp... and, as mentioned previously, if you need to deliver non-square in the end, you'll want to drop that square comp into a non-square comp for final render.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW