VS2019 Photo Distortion with Title when making an H.264 file

[bonchien]

I'm using VS2019 to combine some home videos by month. I like to place a photo from a month with a title at the beginning of each month's home videos. I've done this for years using older versions of VS. I'm having a problem with VS2019 as the photo at the beginning of the timeline distorts and gets really wide when the animated title runs then goes back to normal after the title animation has finished. In settings>Preferences>Edit I have Image resampling set to Keep aspect ratio. The photo distortion does not happen if I make a mp4 video instead of H.264, but most of the video input files are encoded using H.264. I would like to keep the video format as H.264 so I can use smart render and cut down on the rendering time. Are there any suggestions on fixing the photo distortion when a title runs over the photo?