Lost Video Island

kAoTiX · Joined: 19 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

I recently purchased a new video camera that says it records in 16:9 but when i view the recorded videos on my computer they are 4:3 and look terrible.
How can I use Sony Vegas to alter the aspect ratio back to 16:9?

I've seen various tutorials showing how to change the aspect ratio but it's a simple video crop and this removes alot of the video which is annoying as the 4:3 aspect ratio makes the video look horrible anyway.

I appologise if this has been posted before, I did try and search but found mostly what i'd seen before. Please direct me to any previous posts in this event.

Any help is much appreciated, thanks.

Polarbear · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2008 1:23 pm Post subject:

Hey. If you right click on the video clips in your project and then select aspect ratio you can change the aspect ratio there. 1.3333 sounds like it would do the job

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kAoTiX · Joined: 19 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

I have changed the pixel ratio to 1.33333 (which says HD) but it still doesn't render properly. It renders with a sideways letterbox (black bars on left and right) and the video is even smaller.

Am I rendering it incorrectly?

Any chance you could post what to do from import to render.
For now i'm not putting any effects onto the video, just converting it from MPEG2-Stream to AVI to make sure I can output from Vegas in the correct ratio.

Thanks for your reply also.

Polarbear · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2008 8:09 pm Post subject:

When I have full screen video clips that setting usually does the trick. It might be a setting you have with your project properties or your render settings. Does it look normal in the video preview window before you render it? then it's probably the aspect ratio in the render settings. Try setting everything to the default settings.
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kAoTiX · Joined: 19 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

the video is imported and gets output in the render window as i would expect it to actually get rendered. however it doesn't.

i've tried setting everything i could find to widescreen ratio but still no dice.

Polarbear · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2008 8:26 pm Post subject:

Ah right must be your render settings then. If you click custom when you choose to render a video then select the video tab you can change the aspect ratio there.
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kAoTiX · Joined: 19 Jul 2008 Posts: 4

I fixed the problem!

I've created a new profile template now for my camera videos. I had to manually set an aspect ratio of 720x430 and a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0000

Once I import the video into the timeline I have to right click it and in the properties change the videos pixel ratio to 1.0000 and possibly untick 'maintain aspect ratio'. Not sure on that one I just do it anyway.

I wish there was a way to save the video pixel aspect ratio by default so I don't have to do it everytime I add a video. It's not that bad though, at least I can render my videos now.

Thanks for the help Polarbear.

elvira · Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 11

I have had good success with unchecking "maintain aspect ratio" and then exporting the video out with the correct frame dimensions (and choosing square pixel aspect ratio). A few good custom frame dimensions for 16:9 video are 640x360, 720x406, 768x432, or 856x480. Export out as uncompressed (or WMV, whatever) and select "square aspect ratio" or "pixel aspect ratio 1.0" and the video should look good.

The advantage to exporting out as uncompressed is that you can then open the uncompressed video in another program, like VirtualDubMod, Avidemux, or MPEG Streamclip, and convert it to XviD AVI or H.264 MP4. Vegas's internal compressor for these codecs is so-so, but when you use VirtualDubMod or Avidemux in particular, you can do additional things like crop off black letterbox bars, or use a noise reduction filter.