16:9 Widescreen Videos

[Wizzo]

I submitted a few videos to the new site and had some accepted.

All my sequences are shot in 16:9 aspect ratio - widescreen. When they play in the flash video window they appear distorted.

The original WMV files are OK - they look and play perfectly on the PC.

The last 2 videos submiited were resized to 640*360, hoping it would help, but they still show the same issue when played via the site. The thumbnails of these are now in the correct aspect ratio, but not when played.

Anyone know how to cure this ?

Thanks

[Chris Kilroy]

Hi Steve,

Unfortunately, as of now, the site isn't able to determine what's a widescreen video and what isn't, so everything is resized to a 3:2 aspect ratio.

I use a video editor which automatically maintains aspect ratio of the video and adds the black bars to the top/bottom of the frame.

I hope that we will be able to provide support for true widescreen videos in the future!

[Wizzo]

Hi Steve,

Unfortunately, as of now, the site isn't able to determine what's a widescreen video and what isn't, so everything is resized to a 3:2 aspect ratio.

I use a video editor which automatically maintains aspect ratio of the video and adds the black bars to the top/bottom of the frame.

I hope that we will be able to provide support for true widescreen videos in the future!

Thanks Chris - it confirms I'm not going mad :smile:

What editor do you use ?

[Wizzo]

Finally did it, but with the tools I had available it wasn't easy.

I have Ulead Video Studio 8 and the latest version of the Nero suite - I find the editing features of Ulead better, but Nero is superior creating DVD menus.

I took the 16:9 original AVI file, passed it through Nero Vision and exported it to AVI with no compression, but in 4:3 aspect ratio at 640*480. This resulted in the video appearing as widescreen, but in 'letter box' format with black stripes at the top and bottom of the screen.

Unfortunately, Nero doesn't seem to be able to export to WMV format, so the output AVI file from the previous step was then passed back to Ulead Video Studio and re-output as WMV, adjusting the sampling rate and smoothness settings to improve quality over the default config.

[Kelly Lynch]

Had the same issue, but similarly asked Quicktime to constrain proportions using letterbox.

Best,

KL