Changing size during playing?

[paintjam]

Hi, newbie here! I have just finished my first project and rendered it as a mpeg2 file. In the playback, the size of the screen (16:9) jumps to a smaller version (I assume 4:3) when there is a part of the movie that has not a title.

I solved this problem for now with adding more titles, and this helped, but I want to prevent that for my next project!

Jacqueline
(Using VideoStudio12 on Vista.)

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forum,

I've never came across this sort of problem until now. VS will maintain a single aspect ratio throughout the entire project. It will be 16:9 (widescreen) or 4:3. If the project settings are 16:9 and you happen to drop in a 4:3 clip, it will appear to have black pillars on the left and right sides. If the project settings are 4:3 and you have a 16:9 clip inserted, it will be letter-boxed, ie; black bars across the top and bottom. Trevor has a great article on his website that will explain this in more detail:
http://lata.me.uk/video_studio/16_9/16_9.htm.

Are you placing your clips on the Main video track or one of the overlay tracks? If the latter are they scaled to Fit to Screen? In the Preferences dialog you can set the default when inserting clips into an overlay track to Fit to Screen. If not then they are inserted at 25% of the screen size.

[paintjam]

Thank you so much Ron for answering so quickly!

I already found the link you sent, so I learned this during my first movie. Today I opened up VS12 ProX2 and saw that there was a tick box on the opening screen for selecting 16:9...
Must have been so eager to start the software that I did not look good enough! To be honest, I think that you should be able to select settings when the software has opened and start a new project... But anyway, I have ticked the box now!

So this might explain that with the titling I added, I was not able to use the complete width of the movie, but a box that looked like a 4:3 box...? The project assumed that I was using both 16:9 and 4:3 sizes in the same movie.
The titling track has forced to show in 16:9, but when this was not used, it jumped to 4:3.

I did not use the Overlay track at all. I have put still images on the video track. That is correct, isn't it?

Thanks again for your help!


Jacqueline

[Ron P.]

You can put still images on the main video or overlay tracks..

[paintjam]

Thank you! Want it to learn the right way

I am going to like this forum.... Quick answers, a really great help!

Jacqueline

[paintjam]

Thank you again Ron! The second movie I made with the setting of 16:9 solved my problems of changing size during playback!

Jacqueline