I have not captured from my analogue tape Sony A1P to Veg 9 for a while, but I now find I am getting a letterboxed picture in the project. This shows as thumbnails in the media bin & also in the preview from the timeline. My project settings are PAL DV Widescreen & I am capturing W/S content from the camera. I have 32 bit F/P set, but I don't think this is the cause.

Any suggestions.
RonC.

Maybe the PAR is wrong?

Thanks Edward,- I'm don't know what you mean by "PAR" but I checked in the camera settings and there is a menu which offers "Squeeze, Letter box or Edge Crop" but this appears to be for down converting from HDV - DV on the fly when capturing.

I was down converting at the time from HDV (1440 x 1080) - DV (720 x 576) and it was set to Letterbox, but I don't follow this when the original video is already HDV W/S. - Why would you want to do any of these ?

However, I set it to Squeeze while viewing in the Vegas capture monitor and it appeared to fix it.
But then I decided why not just capture in HD and see.

It all appeared OK but now I notice there is a small black band on each L & R edge of the frame when viewed from the timeline but they are not there in the original captured frames in Vegas or when I view them in the trimmer. - Strange.

So does this mean now that when I render out, that there will be these small black bands each side of the frame ?

Any thoughts - ?

RonC.

PAR = Pixel Aspect Ratio

DV is 720 x 480 - NOT 576. The PAR determines whether it's 4:3 or 16:9 but BOTH are 720x480. 4:3 simply has a PAR of .9091 while 16:9 has a PAR of 1.2121.

PAL DV is 720x576.

Ron, if you have the HD footage in a DV timeline, you will see those thin black bands on the sides because DV widescreen (and DVD widescreen) is slightly wider than true 16:9, while the HD footage is true 16:9. Therefore, the HD footage doesn't fill the entire DV widescreen frame.

I suggest editing on an HDV timeline. If you absolutely must edit on a DV timeline, then go into pan/crop, right-click on the frame, and choose "Match output aspect." Then, copy/paste the event attributes to all the other clips on the timeline. Do this before you add any FX.

Thanks David. - I didn't realise this was the cause and yes I do have a PAL DV W/S PAR (Thanks Edward). Is it too late to alter this mid project ? I only have cuts & fades & I see the setting I should have used when importing HD now - HDV 1080 (1.333).

However, I will be exporting to both DV Tape (not HDV), & DVD.

Any suggestions ?

RonC.

Sorry, David. The NTSC numbers are ingrained in my head. I didn't check PAL.

Thanks David. - I didn't realise this was the cause and yes I do have a PAL DV W/S PAR (Thanks Edward). Is it too late to alter this mid project ? I only have cuts & fades & I see the setting I should have used when importing HD now - HDV 1080 (1.333).

Are you talking about the clips or the project settings?

As long as you don't change the frame rate, you can switch the project settings between frame sizes (e.g. DV to HDV) on the fly with no problems. (And changing the frame rate in PAL is changing between 50i, 50p, or 25p, so that wouldn't be much of a problem, either. Some NTSC frame rates can be problematic.)