16:9 playing 4:3

[Peter Copestake]

Pendle MM uses a Panasonic BluRay player linked by HDMI to a Mitsubishi projector. Fine for everyone's films except one member's whose latest 16:9 production plays as a boxed 4:3, ie smaller than standard 4:3 and compressed side to side as well. If we use a Sony BD player on the projector his disc plays widescreen as it does on Panasonic TVs belonging to me and another member if played on Sony or old Panasonic DVD player/recorders but not on modern Panasonic BluRays.

Can anyone explain, please?

Peter.

[tom hardwick]

Are his films being edited as masked down 720 x 476 images or is he shooting and editing in the widescreen mode do you know? The latter is still 720 x 576 of course, but the files are 'flagged' so that the 720 figure is stretched out to 1024 to give the 16:9 aspect ratio.

It's one good thing about 'full HD'. It's 1920 x 1080, 16:9 by definition.

tom.

[Peter Copestake]

Thanks, Tom, for your concern.
The film was made on 3 cameras, two using the masked down type of widescreen and one, a new HD but set to SD, on proper widescreen. The editor left his programme on 720 X 576 for the sake of the older camcorders.
Peter.

[Dave Watterson]

The critical question is whether the film maker instructed his edit system to treat all the material as 16:9. In older Premiere systems this meant right-clicking on each clip and from the pop-up menu telling it the ratio. Other editors will vary.

On many systems using separate DVD authoring programs (including Premiere's Encore) you also had to mark the incoming timelines as 16:9 ratio.

What all that did was put an instruction into the tape telling other equipment to treat the file as 16:9.

If the material is still on his computer it is easy to check and try again.

Dave

[Peter Copestake]

Thanks, Dave. I will ask. I think he's using CS5. The mystery to us, accepting that he must have not got something right, is why some players play it 16:9, including his own of course which is why he didn't realise anything was wrong, and some don't.

It seems to me, who has no clue about how these things work, of when a 16:9 film from mixed cameras I was editing was quite OK except when I did a fade or cross-fade, I think, when the 16:9 briefly went to 4:3 at the end of the effect. I only solved that by only taking the effects (using the red line on Prem. 6.5) to about 90%. Difficult now I'm relying on memory and it's no longer on the computer to explain more.

Peter.

[Peter Copestake]

Further to all the above, my colleague uses CS4 and Encoder. But, confusion worse confounded, having made a single file from the timeline and trying to make a DVD from that neither that nor any other of his DVD making programmes work at all, or stop half way through having only used half the disc and not finalising it, though the bit that is there plays, on the computer, 16:9.

I'm sticking with 6.5 and SD!

Thanks for trying to help.

Peter.