Exporting Widescreen - It shouldn't be this difficult!

Question

Hello all,
I really hope someone can help me here, I'm a long-term user of Premiere Pro yet I recently upgraded to CS4 with the new media encoder, and simple operations now seem impossible, in this scenerio - exporting a widescreen video...in widescreen!
I have a video, about 1 minute long. Shot in widescreen. Edited in a Premiere widescreen project and for the export settings: Mov and/or Mpeg and/or WMV, and the DV PAL Widescreen Preset - which then gives me the (unchangeable) frame size of 720x 576. I choose Square Pixels for the ratio selection and export. I get a widescreen video plus letterboxing to give me a 4:3 screen. Seeing as i can't change the frame size, I changed the pixels to Widescreen, and it gives me a 4:3 video without letterboxing, thereby distorting it horribley. I have tried changing everything! Different codecs give me the correct size but a file hundreds and hundreds of MB big. Seriously, it shouldn't be this hard!!
Please someone, talk some sense!
Ryan

Answer 1

The other formats won't let me change the frame size from 720x576.
If you're attempting to go from a DV source (judging by the screenshot you posted, you are) to a DV output (which you are if you're going to MS DV AVI or to QuickTime DV MOV), you have no other option than to encode at 720x576, period. That's what DV is (in PALLand, anyway; in NTSCVille, it's 720x480). It doesn't matter if you're coming from or going to a standard 4:3 aspect ratio or a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, as long as you're using a DV codec your files will alwaysalwaysalways be 720x576. The differentiation between the display aspect ratio or DAR (4:3 or 16:9), therefore, comes from the pixel aspect ratio, or PAR--in other words, what shape are the pixels? For standard DV sources, the pixels' width-to-height ratio is smaller; for widescreen DV sources, the pixels' width-to-height ratio is larger. Note that these are relative, and not absolute, as I'm speaking in generalities about DV--NTSC DV and PAL DV PARs differ. As Jim pointed out, some programs are able to properly read the PAR written into a DV (or other video) file, while some simply read the raw pixel count, which in your case is 720x576. That's why it looks weird and not what you want when played back--the footage is all there, but not drawn as you'd like.
The only real safe bet, in my mind, is to use square pixels when encoding for computer playback, especially when dealing with less-than-technically-savvy clients. Computers use square pixels, and that's what they like. Encode using square pixels for web playback and local playback formats (like WMV, FLV, H.264, some QT flavors), and you'll avoid the weird stretchies. This does, of course, involve some small amount of computation on your part to determine what is the proper pixel count when using square pixels, but in the case of 16:9 widescreen display, it's usually just a case of dividing your height by 9, and multiplying that result by 16 to get the width. Punch those values into AME, and set your pixel aspect ratio to Square Pixels, and you should be in good shape... pun slightly intended.