Sorry chaps, here’s a cry from the Liquid Edition 5.62 wilderness. I’ve tried searching the Avid Liquid forum, but no one is talking about old versions any more. Also tried the old Pinnacle forums, but search just turns up Studio 9 and 10 threads. There doesn't appear to be anything on this subject on this forum, either.

I’ve just bought a Canon XH-A1 HDV camera (gorgeous pictures!), but I must save up a few more pennies before I can upgrade my computer. However, LE 5.62 can edit wide-screen DV pictures, can’t it? As a first experiment, I’ve reset Aspect Ratio in System Settings, as directed by the manual, and then followed my normal work-flow: captured some footage down-converted by the camera using Scenelyzer, imported the clips into LE5.62 by linking to the originals, placed some clips on the time-line, trimmed them, added some captions and applied my normal Dissolve CPU transitions. The clips were recognised as 16:9 by Scenelyzer and LE. All looked good on playback, both on the computer screen and on my camera LCD. Next I fused to AVI. When I played the resulting file in Windows Media Player (WMP), I found that the un-rendered footage plays as proper 16:9 but the transitions play as stretched 4:3.

I normally use the CPU dissolve to avoid the slight displacement and green tinge of the GPU version. I replaced some of the CPU dissolves in my test sequence with the GPU versions, then deleted all render files, to be sure that the transitions were re-rendered, but the effect is just the same.

I don't suppose it is a problem with WMP. After all, it just plays the DV video stream. If it's flagged as widescreen, WMP will play it as widescreen. If not, it plays it as normal-aspect. Therefore, it looks like LE5.62 does not flag rendered transitions as widescreen.

I fuse to AVI to create input files for ProCoder Express (makes better MPEG2 files than LE5.62) or Windows Media Encoder, to make WMV etc. for the Internet.

An alternative method of making an AVI is "Export As". If I choose this, there are several alternative codecs offered:
Full frames (uncompressed)
Cinepak Codec by Radius
Intel Indeo Video 4.5
Microsoft Video 1
Indeo Video 5.10
Canopus DV Codec for DVBooster Pack
DivX Pro(tm) 5.1 codec
I don’t like the sound of any of them, but I tried a few, just to see. None were any good! WMP played outputs from all that I tried as 4:3. Again, looks like LE does not flag stuff that it has rendered as widescreen.

What’s going on? What do I do to get around it? What have I missed? I'm sure this has been covered before, but I haven't found it. If you know where I should look, please post a link.

Many thanks.

Not that I'm going to be much help, but I do use Liquid.

What have you not moved up to the current version of 7.1 SP2?

You are a few versions down.

Jeff

Not that I'm going to be much help, but I do use Liquid.
What have you not moved up to the current version of 7.1 SP2?
You are a few versions down.
Jeff
If you read my post you'll find the explanation - been spending my money on other things :-) . 5.62 has been working fine up until now. Upgrading (even to v6) requires a hardware upgrade. If it ain't broke... However, if there's no work around for this problem, then I'll have to price up the alternatives.

Well, I've tried a few things:

One suggestion was to import the fused file back into an empty sequence then re-fusing. This did not have the desired effect. When played back in WMP, the rendered transitions flip to 4:3 just as in the first fused file.

The good news is that, for my purposes, making wmv file in Media Encoder and making MPEG2 elementry streams for ProCoder Express, it doesn't actually matter because you can instruct them both that the whole fused file is PAL 16:9, and they will ignore the actual widescreen flag settings. In both programs, you have to go digging around to find the relevant settings - if you take the defaults you'll get squashed 4:3 footage, in both cases.

Anyway, thanks for the assistance. If all goes to plan, I'll be getting a new PC towards the end of the year, almost certainly with whatever is the current version of Liquid at the time. But at least I know that I can make proper 16:9 SD DVDs in the mean time.

Cheers!