Electronic Anamorphic--proper size?

[Brandt Ryan]

What is the proper size of the electronic anamorphic footage? 854X480 or 720X360? That is, is the footage stretched vertically to fill the 4:3 CCD's--and I have to shrink it back down--or is the footage smashed down into the 4:3 screen, and I have to expand it back out?

Also, if I capture raw DV into Premiere, and onto my hard drive as an AVI file--are the pixels the same as they were on my camera (non-square)--or after capture, do they become square?

I'm having trouble choosing proper option with windows media encoder. There are options to resize the footage, but also options to change the pixel aspect ratio to non-square dimmensions. They have widescreen presets for the pixel aspect ratio as well--DV NTSC 16:9, and also Anamorphic 1:2 NTSC. I don't know which to use! What's the difference between the two--or from resizing the image to 720 by 360 for that matter--and not changing the pixel aspect ratio at all?

Confused...

[Rob Lohman]

Pixel Aspect is a number that is used to INTERPRET and DISPLAY
the footage. Everything we shoot is in 720x480 [ntsc] or
720x576 [pal]. The PA tells a package how to display it to you.

For example. The normal PA for NTSC DV is 0.9. This means that
if a program wants to correctly show the footage to you it must
either show it at 648x480 or 720x800.

Now if you are exporting footage to a program that doesn't
understand pixel aspects (ie, only understands a PA of 1.0 ->
square pixels -> computer monitor) you can do the calculation
yourself and resize the footage.

To answer your last question, choose DV NTSC 16:9 if you are
working in DV.

Now if you want to resize the footage just see what PA Premiere
is using for 16:9 anamorphic footage and multiply your horizontal
(720) resolution by that number and you get the correct resolution
to view the footage at when looking at in square pixels.

If you choose the correct Project Premiere will do this for you,
so you only need to do this if you take the footage into Photoshop
for example or another application that doesn't understand PA.