720x480 or 640x480 ?

How come if you export a Quicktime movie out of your DV or DVCPro50 timeline, then go to your hard drive and open it in the Quicktime player it's 640 x 480 instead of 720 x 480. Is it squeezing it, is it cropping it, and why is it even doing this ??

It doesn't when I do it. Are you sure your Sequence Settings are correct? Which export option are you using, Export - QuickTime Movie or Export - Using QuickTime Conversion?


www.derekmok.com

QuickTime Player is helping you by showing you the movie in its square-pixel representation.

It seems to be random. why doesn't QT "help" any and all 720 x 480 movies that are opened in it. There seems to be some key or deciding factor that it uses, and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

Also - why does all DV, DVCPRO50, etc. footage always have 2 or 3 pixels of black on each side.
Looks alright on TVs because that gets cropped off, but looks crappy on the media players in computers which show every pixel.

Please forgive my being obtuse here, but I too am curious about what is going on.

Does the reduction from 720 to 640 (if that is what is happening) have to do with retaining the correct aspect of the picture?

I have another question as well. In earlier QT versions (maybe starting with 6), QT seemed to implement a gamma conversion when a file was played on a Windows machine, so that the movies looked much the same on Wintels as on Macs.

In QT 7, this feature does not seem, to me at least, to be working as well as before, and the movies are noticeably darker on Windows. Am I the only one who imagines he is seeing this?