Hey there. So I'm working on outputting some footage from Premiere to DVD.

The help file says that the best way to handle this is to use footage that's 720x540 that has square pixels, then import it into a scene whose project is set up to produce 720x480 with a 0.9 pixel aspect ratio. So when I import my 720x540 footage, it does resize it to fit the size of the 720x480x0.9 project, but I get terrible tearing in the image, see link below. It's almost like part of the resize happens by just skipping every 10th line of the original source image, which causes horrible stair stepping on diagonal lines.

http://www.neilblevins.com/temp/stepping.jpg

When I output it to uncompressed avi, I get the same awful tearing, so it's not just an odd artifact in the monitor. Does anyone know how you can change the downres settings in premiere so it does a better job of down-resing the 720x540 footage to 720x480?

- Neil

I don't know were you got the figures 720 x 540 from, as 720 x 480 is the standard NTSC screen size. Did you download the file from the net? Stick with 720 x 480 using rectangular pixels and you will be fine.

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Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...

I got that info directly from the Premiere helpfile:

Using square-pixel footage for output to DV
To use square-pixel files in a D1 or DV project:
- If your final output is D1 (NTSC), create and save it at a 720 x 540 frame size.

I know, it sounds weird to me too But bringing footage in that's 720x480x1 pixel aspect ratio, and then saving it to a 720x480x0.9 pixel aspect ratio produces stretched images when I output it to DVD. 720x540x1 footage saved to 720x480x0.9 produces no stretching, but those weird artifacts.

- Neil

The original footage has to use rectangular pixels aswell, that's how a camcorder records them. I use PAL and I've never had to alter the height figure of the video, it's always stayed at 720 x 576, did you check the project settings at the start of the project. If you set it to 720 x 480 at the very start when you create a new project then you shouldn't have to alter it.

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Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...

> The original footage has to use rectangular pixels aswell, that's how a
> camcorder records them.

This is not camcorder footage, this is images created in photoshop, which have square pixels.

But thanks anyways.

- Neil

Ok so now we know were the odd size images were created. Try recreating them in Photoshop again using the NTSC setting (select rectangular pixels, not square) when selecting a new file or try resizing the files you have to 720 x 480 and see what they look like. If they look too distorted in Photoshop you will have to recreate them again, but if they look alright after resizing then use them.

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Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...

Well, I got it to work, although I'm a bit mystified as to how. Basically I took the 720x540xsquare images, resized them to 720x480xsquare in photoshop (redoing them using the NTSC setting in photoshop would have been too huge a task, since the image size function doesn't seem to allow for changing the pixel aspect ratio), then brought those into premiere and saved my avi to 720x480x0.9pixel aspect, and the results on my TV look good to me. Maybe they are slightly distorted but not enough to be obvious, or maybe premiere somehow did the proper thing to the images, either way, the results will do. Thanks for your help.

- Neil