Hello all!

Again Vegas is bringing me down. I am cutting together a short clip which is is a spoof on... let's just say "questionable" films. Just before things get interesting there is a cut to tv noise. The problem is, the widescreen footage is stretched over 720*576. I tried to fix this, but had no luck for some reason. The frame got resized but I could never get the correct proportions. Now I shoot a bit of tv noise and capture it and guess what, it has black borders top and bottom. On the camera, both pieces of footage look identical with the same Widescreen setting!

I don't mind the stretched widescreen footage since it makes the whole thing look even more cheesy. But the differing styles are unacceptable. As far as I can say, both clips have identical properties. Here are a couple of screengrabs, just before and after the cut to the noise.

Any help appreciated.

If a video clip or still graphic has a different aspect ratio than the project's aspect ratio, you can choose whether you want the clip to maintain its own aspect ratio (with black bars filling in where there is no image), or be stretched/squeezed to meet the aspect ratio of the project. In version 9, you can check this by right-clicking on the clip in the time line, then selecting properties. See if the "Maintain aspect ratio" box is checked. Maybe one of your clips has the box checked, while the other clip does not. I know you can do this in version 8, but I don't remember if the steps are identical.

Ken

You can also use the pan/crop tool. Select the clip, select pan/crop, right click inside the bounding box and choose Match Output Aspect. That will crop the clip to the same proportions as your project settings and you can then move the bounding box around to find the best area of the clip to use.

Agree with Ian. The key to your issue is "Match Output Aspect".

Thanks guys. This has indeed pointed me in the right direction. I managed to stretch the noise clip like the rest of the film although it was a case of having to check and uncheck the option again for it to appear correctly. When I am done with this version I will have ago at putting widescreen on the whole thing. Then I can hopefully present both versions to my client.

Great and fast help here as always, I will no doubt return here sobbing like a baby if I run into further problems.