How to change the aspect Attribute for a given clip?

[shperkinsjr]

Hello all and Happy New Year.

In transferring my old home movies from previously captured .AVI files (from tape to raw .AVI) to DVDs over my Christmas vacation, I have finally come to the point in my video tape timeline where I made the switch to 16:9. It's on my first video from 2002 and unfortunately I flipped the 'widescreen' switch on my camcorder mid-tape on that 2002 Mini-DV tape. So on this .AVI file I have mixed aspect ratios. When I pull that .AVI file into X3, the attribute is set to 4:3, so the 2nd half this file is out of whack.

What I've done is split the .AVI by scenes so I could work with them separately. I've created a DVD compliant video file from all the 4:3 scenes and now I need to work with the 16:9 scenes, but they still carry the 4:3 attribute so X3 displays them incorrectly. I don't see a way to change the attribute of these clips.

Anyone know how to go about changing the attribute from 4:3 to 16:9 for video that was shot in 16:9?

Thanks!

[Ron P.]

Jeff (Black Lab) does an excellent job using an ESPN side-bar method, to mask or hide the different aspect ratios. Have a read through his quick and easy tutorial, and also have a look at the video that he uses it in.

http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php ... 11#p183611

[shperkinsjr]

I'm not sure this will work for my problem. My video's aspect attribute does not match the actual video, due to switching my camera to 16:9 after filming 4:3 on the same tape. So X3 is reading the clip as a 4:3 and framing it in the edit window that way. So it's compressed left to right and distorted. I need to change the attribute to 16:9 so X3 displays it correctly in the edit window.

Maybe I should just 'distort' the clip out to the 16:9 frame, thereby stretching out to the correct aspect?

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

If the camera recorded the video correctly it shouldn’t be distorted, provided you captured to Split by Scene in the first place.
It should look like 4:3 but not distorted.
If you applied Split by Scene after capture then yes it will be distorted.

Yes you should try the Distort option. Apply to the first clip, then copy and paste “attributes” to the rest. You will lose some detail top and bottom.

Read my guide to 16:9 from the link below,

Just at the moment I am having problems accessing the web pages, maybe that’s on holiday too.
There is a link to Jeffs approach to the end of the guide.

You may be best to recapture using Split by Scene, even so you would still have to re-size/distort the frames to create 16:9.