Retaining widescreen format

[Ian Stark]

I'm having a dumb moment here and hope someone can help. I'll be happy for whatever amount of sarcastic response you wish to add!

In Vegas I've rendered a DV resolution copy of my project which is widescreen PAL (768 x 576).

I am now trying to use Windows Media Encoder to encode that file to several different file sizes but I cannot seem to retain the widescreen format! The pixel aspect ratio value box is greyed out and cropping does just that - it crops.

What am I doing wrong?!

Any help for a poor, too-much-christmas-cheer-last-night old sot would be most welcome!

I appreciate this is a little OT for the Vegas forum but couldn't really see any other forum that would be appropriate. Thanks in advance.

Ian . . .

[Ian Briscoe]

Hi Ian


Go to "Properties" -> "Compression" tab. Click "Edit". Then on the "General" tab at the bottom "Allow Non Square Pixel Output". Click OK to close that screen - then Apply on the Compression tab - then go to "Video Size" tab and you should be able to select whatever you want.

You probably already know this but Vegas can create WMV files directly - just set size to 1048x576 for full widescreen or just change the pixel aspect ratio to 1.333 - either way seems to work OK.

Ian

[Ian Stark]

Ah yes, fantastic, thanks Ian.

The reason I was looking at using WME in this case was that there seems to be many more attributes I can play with (and there's my problem right there!).

Thanks again for a prompt response. Hope your weather up there is better than ours down here!

Cheers,

Ian . . .

[Ian Briscoe]

It's not! :-)

[Ian Stark]

Oh dear, sorry to hear that! Just collected my youngest from football training - not a pretty sight.

Ian, would it be cheeky to ask for a bit more advice. Don't know if you're a WME guru or not but I suspect you have a fair bit on me.

I'm trying to compress a 10 minute widescreen PAL avi to a ~15Mb file and a ~50Mb wmv file, destined for a web server. I'm looking for 384 x 288 for the smaller file and full size for the larger file. I appreciate quality is going to be sacrificed (at both sizes I suspect) but the client has specifically requested these attributes.

Would you be able to guide me towards WME settings for the best possible quality output files, given those restrictions?
My attempts are poor and I'm sure I can improve.

Many thanks for any help you can offer but don't worry if you'd rather be doing something else!

Cheers,

Ian . . .

[Ian Briscoe]

Hi Ian

I'm fairly new to WME myself - up to now I use Vegas to encode. But playing about with it....

I took a 10 minute avi and encoded using Bit Rate VBR at 600kbps at full size - file size was 49.5mb - looks fine.

For the smaller size I encoded at 200kbps and at that size it looks OK - a bit of blockiness but not too bad - file size was 19.5mb.

Then I tried using Quality VBR - the full size file at 70% smoothness came in at 50.3mb and the smaller size at 60% smoothness came in at 16.3 mb.

Personally I couldn't tell the difference between the Bit Rate VBR and the Quality VBR.

My video had lots of movement so if yours doesn't you could maybe ramp the bit rate/smoothenss up a bit.

In all cases I left the audio at CD quality.

Hope this helps.

Ian

[Ian Stark]

Above and beyond, Ian. Many thanks indeed. I'll play around.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Ian . . .