For those of you familiar with this sh*t... I've been trying to film and edit some wide screen DV footage, and I've used Adobe Premiere on the wide screen project setting. When I upload the finished footage to a tape, the camera plays the video in wide screen, but when I plug the camera into the TV(via the VCR), the image is stretched to fit the full screen. Why would this happen, and can it be fixed?
Yeah, it doesn't work that way. If the footage is in widescreen, capture it in Premiere on a Full Screen project. Then under video options, click "maintain aspect ratio" for each segment of your footage. That should work.
I tried what you said, and the rendered screen doesn't seem as wide as the footage I shot. What am I doing wrong?
Pitiful, You'll never get anywhere with the video editing, even if somehow you should stumble onto what you are looking for you will eventually suffer a catastrophic collapse.
Don't know what to tell you. That way works for me. On a regular television screen, the image is usually chopped off a little bit from the Premiere image. But if the image is distorted in Premiere, too, then there's something else going on. But I don't know what since, as I said, the method I mentioned works for me with my equipment.
Thanks for your help anyway, Mr. Paige. It is much appreciated. So to follow your sig, please tell me about your latest movie.
Thanks for asking. Here's the description from the casting notice I sent out: THE BODY A Feature-Length DV Comedy James and Maureen Pastorini wake up to find an unexpected visitor in their apartment. An attractive but very dead woman mysteriously appears on the living room floor one morning, creating something of an inconvenience for the couple. Without any answers and not wanting a big hassle with the police, the couple decides to get rid of the dead body themselves. But they’re not as successful as they’d like. If one were so inclined (and had Adobe Acrobat Reader on their computer), one could read the script online here: http://www.filmdallas.com/body.pdf We start shooting February 21.
There aren't a whole lot of options available. If yuo've got a horror movie, you can often get some level of distribution through an indie horror outfit, but there's not likely to be any real money in it. Self-distribution is the common route, and even then, you're not likely to sell a whole lot. I'm doing this one to get back into the swing of shooting and to use as sort of a show reel to help grease the wheels for an HD picture I'm doing later this year.
I think I figured out the problem. Turns out that the wide screen "feature" on my camera is just a gimmick, and it throws the resolution way off. Oh well, guess it's full-screen filming for me...
What camera do you have? One thing you could do is create your own black bars in Premiere. Just compose your shots for widescreen and then throw some black bars on there in post. I did that with my first movie. Worked fine. Of course, it's sometimes hard to know where the widescreen frame is when shooting that way.
mrpaige -- Just out of curiosity, are you most often seen in public with a very distinctive piece of headwear?
It's not a professional camera, just a Sony DV Handicam. I thought about adding the black bars myself. But if I do that, and the film is ever shown on a wide-screen TV, then it wouldn't play properly on that, would it?
Nope, though the method I described first wouldn't work on a widescreen TV, either. I actually shoot widescreen on the camera, and then instead of exporting back to tape, I burn a simple DVD with Adobe Encore and make taped copies off of that. The DVD copy would then have true widescreen... or at least it's supposed to. I don't have a widescreen TV, so I've never tried it. I was just curious as to which type of camera you were using. You actually have to go pretty high up the Sony product line to get true widescreen. Even the VX2000/PD150 doesn't have true widescreen.
I have a friend in Dallas who's a film director/screenwriter whose last name is Paige (or maybe Page). Thought it might be you.
