Digital Cinema Preview stretched?

Hey all,

I'm editing DVCPRO HD on a Dell 2005 fpw (widescreen) monitor. The sequence is not anamorphic. But when I display (apple+F12) the Digital Cinema Preview, the resulting image is stretched width-wise and squeezed vertically. In all other ways, it plays perfectly fine.

Anyone run into this, or have any ideas how to fix it?

open System Prefs and check your display prefs.

there'll be another one for that monitor that will work with your footage.

i know for my laptop's 15" monitor i can choose either 800 x 600 or 800 x 600 (stretched)

tip:
in the display prefs panel in System Prefs there is a check box: "show displays in menu bar" that makes it a lot easier to adjust your display settings in the future.


nick

Interesting thought, but I tried all resolutions, and the preview comes up the same, stretched.

It has to do with the native aspect ratio of the DVCPRO HD timeline (1280x1080), as the Preview looks fine when I drop the same footage into a 720x480 timeline... but then of course, I'd have to render everything...

So it looks correct in the Canvas but vertically squashed through DCDP?

Martin Baker
[www.digital-heaven.co.uk]
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps

Yes, exactly. Hmmm.

Solved it.

It was a pixel aspect ratio problem, one that did not show up in the Canvas, but did during Desktop Cinema Preview. Here's how it happened...

I used the trick shown here recently about quickly creating a sequence based off of a master clip that would natively play the media, without having to muck around with settings. The technique is to right-click the master clip, select "create multiclip sequence", and the sequence that results will have the same codec as the master clip.

In my case however, the sequence it created played and edited fine, until viewing it through Desktop Cinema Preview. When I analyzed the sequence (apple+9), I saw the "pixel aspect ratio" as being set at, well, gibberish. To be specific, "%00ff0.1Hz". When I went through the standard process of resetting up sequence settings, and making a new sequence, I had the exact same settings as the multiclip sequence, but with pixel aspect set at 1280x1080. Now, the sequence plays and edits fine, as it did before, but does not come out stretched in Digital Cinema Preview.

The moral of the story is, when using the cool "multiclip sequence" shortcut to make a sequence, check the attributes of the resulting sequence to make sure there's nothing funky.

Thanks for people's help!