Having real trouble with aspect ratios!

Are you perhaps working in DV25? In which case your resulting file is not squashed to 4:3; it is squashed to 3:2.

Professional tools such as After Effects, do not seem to set display flags for DV aspect ratio, either because that is a relatively new QuickTime feature, or because quite frankly, they don't need to. They are set up internally to render to the correct pixel positions and squash (if 16:9) or stretch (if 4:3) your video to fit the 720x480 DV25 frame. What you are seeing when you play back in QuickTime Player is the actual pixels that make up the video clip. The display is wrong, but that's the actual pixels in your movie. If you import that clip back into, say, Media Composer or Final Cut, you would then tell your editing software what aspect ratio you are working with, and it would handle it correctly. In Media Composer, for instance, aspect ratio flags are routinely ignored, and everything displays in whatever format you have selected...and it's up to the editor to stretch, squeeze, or mask the video if it was shot or created in the wrong aspect ratio. That's why AE doesn't set the display size; it knows you're probably going to go back to something else that is going to handle the video as native pixels anyway.

In QuickTime Pro, you can set the display aspect ratio manually. Use Window|Show Movie Properties (j), select the video track, select the Visual Settings tab, UNCHECK the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" box, and manually enter the square pixel size into the "Scaled Size" box. Save the movie, and it will "remember" the new size. When you compress the movie for web display, export it to a proper-ratio native size rather than as the raw DV stream.

Oh, for NTSC, the screen dimensions to use are as follows:
When starting with 720x480 DV25...
...scale 4:3 video to 640x480
...scale 16:9 video to 853x480

When preparing non-interlaced graphic materials to use in DV...
...create 4:3 material at 720x540
...create 16:9 material at 853x480

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

TECHNICALLY the issue is that After Effects didn't properly encode the clip to display correctly in QuickTime. That said, that feature is a relatively new addition to QuickTime, and QuickTime hasn't exactly been stable since v6.5.3 (which did not have aspect ratio encoding). But it should not be a problem, because you can easily fix it. If the file is DV, then you're going to want to export it to something else anyway, at which point you specify the correct pixel size on export. Or you're going to import it into an editor that won't care how it is marked, and again you can fix it by telling the editor which display mode you want. So yes, it's wrong, but it isn't a disaster. You just need to know about it so that you can deal with it in your workflow.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Oops, you're working in PAL...correction to what I said a couple of posts ago: Where I said "720x480" substitute "720x576"; where I said "854x480" substitute "1024x576".

When you are working with DV, the pixel count is fixed. Regardless of whether you are working in 4:3 or in 16:9, your screen dimensions are a fixed pixel count. In NTSC it's 720x480; in PAL it's 720x576. Either way, that is not the correct pixel count if the pixels are square, which they are on your computer.

After Effects "knows" this, so when you tell it that you are working in widescreen, it stretches the movie to 1024x576 for display. Earlier versions of QuickTime *did not* know this, and After Effects doesn't 'know' that QuickTime now understands about DV screen resolutions, so AE doesn't tell QuickTime that it is a widescreen clip.

When you export from QuickTime you can tell QuickTime that it is a widescreen clip and it will stretch it to the proper dimensions.

The main issue here is that DV resolution is not a proper resolution when rendered in square pixels. The image has to be stretched or squeezed if the pixels are square, which they are in QuickTime.

It sounds to me like you're doing all of the right things. When you export from QuickTime, check the widescreen box, and QuickTime will fix the export correctly. I'm not sure whether it encodes the export with the image stretched out to the correct pixel count, or if it just encodes the actual pixels and marks it to stretch properly for playback. Either way, it should look OK when you play it back.

The bit about interlacing was just to point out that if you are stretching or squeezing a DV frame to fit a 4:3 or 16:9 frame, you should only stretch or squeeze it horizontally. Leave the vertical resolution alone so that you don't turn an interlaced picture into a mess.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.