|  | Re: Can Vegas recognize 720x480 WIDESCREEN video?
by Dave Haynie on May 2, 2012 at 4:49:06 am |
[Robert Reister] "Yes, I set the project properties to widescreen, the preview panel is widescreen, and yet the video plays squished (as a normal 720x480). "
If you're seeing the video playing full height, but horizontally "squished", it sounds as if the camera isn't correctly tagging the file as 16:9. This is metadata -- the visual difference between 16:9 and 4:3 is obvious. But the data is identical; the only difference is how it's interpreted by your player or editor. The squish tells you that the video is tagged at 4:3, but as it's horizontally squished and vertically full height, it's clearly 16:9.
If this is the case, set up a standard DVD 16:9 template. Drop the video onto the timeline. Go to the video clip, right click to get the context menu. Go to Switches, de-select the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" option. Alternately, don't do any of that. Right click on a clip, select "Properties". When you get the pop-up, go to the "Media" tab, and look for the Pixel Aspect Ratio setting. It ought to read 0.9091 (NTSC DV), which means it is, indeed, being tagged as 4:3. Change this to 1.2121 (NTSC DV Widescreen). Click "OK". See if the video looks better.
If you see the video with black bars all around, or top and bottom with a horizontal stretch, you have a "fake" 16:9 video. Some DV camcorders could actually make a good pass at "real" 16:9 video. I had an old Sony camcorder that actually used the extra pixels on the side of the sensor, otherwise used for digital image stabilization, to shoot a larger image for 16:9. Others simply crop a 16:9 windows out of the 4:3 image. When they do that, some will record a true 16:9 image, others will simply letterbox in 4:3. When you see black bars all around, you're in a letterboxed 4:3 video clip. You can crop this, using the Event Pan/Crop tool, but it's going to be low quality.
-Dave
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