No 16:9

grant9954 · Post by **grant9954** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 5:01 am

What am I doing Wrong?

My Panasonic GS400 camcorder has 16:9 and when shooting in that mode it comes out as such when outputted directly to the TV. Capturing with VS9 though, I get 4:3 even when I click 16:9 on the start-up page and all else indicates 16:9 in preferences and properties. Even rendered set at DVD NTSC 16:9 comes out 4:3. Any suggestions?

Thanks
Grant

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:51 am

Hi Grant
How are you capturing your footage.
Digital via Firewire to Dv-Avi
If you captured via Firewire to Dv-Avi then these properties should be the same as your camera footage.
This method actually copies the footage to your pc without re-coding, what you have is what you get.
Or
to Mpeg 2
or
Analogue via a capture card.
You have to set the capture options
Capture / Options / Video Audio Capture Property Settings

After capture, Right click a clip in the timeline and select properties.
These are the actual capture settings.
OR
If you set ‘Show message when inserting first video’ from File Preferences.
Start a new project.
Capture a few minutes.
You will be shown an info window, requesting you to change the property settings, at this point select Details, you will now see both settings.

Hope this helps

Trevor

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 3:07 pm

Grant,
You are probably looking at the capture preview screen, which does not display 16x9 during capture, in order to lighten the load on the CPU. Check out the captured footage in Edit mode and I think that the preview screen will display 16x9.
John

PS, check out http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=5362 for more on capturing from GS400

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 5:28 pm

1. Capture in DV AVI format.

2. When you render the MPEG2 file or create the DVD, make sure the 16:9 aspect ratio is selected, and that non-square pixel rendering is enabled.

On a side note, the 16:9 DV and DVD resolution is still 720x480 / 720x576 (for NTSC and PAL, respectively). This is the same as for 4:3 video. The difference is that the 16:9 pixels are wider, they are not square. That's why it is important to enable non-square pixel rendering. Also, not all media player applications and standalone DVD players support non-square pixel rendering properly, so consider checking your output using another method.

grant9954 · Post by **grant9954** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 12:41 am

Thanks for the speedy reply guys.

Unfortunately, I've been called out of town until tommorrow and don't have my camera, but I believe I had all of the above checked except I captured as mpeg. Are you saying Torsten that 16:9 is only possible when capturing as .avi? I will go over all your suggestions tommorrow and hope that I just missed something and let you know. Like I said, right out of the camera to the t.v's aux imputs works fine.

Thanks again,
Grant

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 12:53 am

MPEG2 does support the 16:9 aspect ratio, or you wouldn't be able to make a 16:9 DVD. But I have not tried capturing directly to 16:9 MPEG2 format, and can't tell you whether that works the way you would expect.

I would recommend against capturing directly to MPEG2 format for a number of other reasons (resource requirements and quality being the most obvious).

Both John and I have GS400s as well, and we have both produced 16:9 DVDs. We both capture to DV AVI first, do our editing, render to MPEG2 format, and then burn. That procedure definitely works, and produces excellent results.

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 3:29 am

Torsten, Ive actually been capturing the GS400 16:9 video directly to mpeg2. My 3 GHz CPU runs about 40% busy during capture with no dropped frames. VS9 is quite stable while editing mpeg and its a quick process to create a video file and then burn.

One slight hitch (EDIT: in VS9 widescreen) is that when you capture a still frame from a widescreen video clip, it looks squeezed horizontally because VS9 defaults the still picture to 4:3 aspect ratio. Workaround: I found that I could create perfect 16:9 jpgs by setting the Preference: Resampling Option to "Fit to Project". Then my captured jpeg stills can be inserted right into the 16:9 project with perfect aspect ratio and it fills the widescreen frame from side to side. However, its necessary to set it back to "Keep Aspect Ratio" for later editing.

Now, if only I could figure out how to get the GS400 to shoot 4MP stills in 16:9, I could integrate them into the video stream without letterboxing.
John

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 4:18 am

Oh no! You don't follow the recommended procedure!

I still prefer going to DV AVI first, simply because doing so gives you more flexibility when you do the encoding. If you have alot of material to put on one DVD, the project would benefit from VBR encoding, and even more so from 2-pass VBR encoding. You can't do 2-pass encoding on-the-fly.

My main system should be powerful enough to handle MPEG encoding, I now have a Pentium D 840 EE -- it's Intel's only dual-core, Hyperthreading-enabled processor.

jchunter · Post by **jchunter** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 4:31 am

Torsten,
Sorry for the digression, but I'm confused by Intel's new CPU naming system. How fast is the 840EE?
John

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 4:39 am

It's got two cores clocked at 3.2GHz each, each with 1MB of cache. It shows up as four processors in Task Manager. I can do full-tilt video encoding and still do other stuff without even noticing any slowdown (except for disk I/O, obviously).

grant9954 · Post by **grant9954** » Sat Jul 30, 2005 6:16 am

OK, back in town and yes I did miss a step.

Captured 16:9 as DV AVI no problem.
Capturing with mpeg I missed the 16:9 option on the aspect ratio dropdown box in mpeg settings tab.
Dumb mistake, but thanks guys for your input.

See you on the pana3ccduser boards!
I'm grundy there, but I havan't posted for awhile.

Grant