Aspect Ratio and interlacing problems

Than you Ian and MartinR, your posts raise a few more questions for me and as well I will try and clear up some other things for you both.

First I guess I am having a problem grasping the aspect ratio concept. For instance 4:3 should be 1.33 (4 divided by 3). 16:9, 16 divided by 9 = 1.77. My video clip is 640x480, 640 divided by 480 = 1.33. So is seems to me that 640x480 is 4:3 aspect ratio. Im I understanding this wrong? And what is 720x480 which is the NTSC standard in FCE because that is not 4:3. 720/480=1.5 which is 3:2 Sorry if I am missing something but I think grasping this will help me alot.

Now some questions.

MartinR,
You say that my capture device tried to put my 4:3 material into 16:9 but this is not the case. Sorry if I did not explain but my resulting file is 640x480 (4:3) and is exactly what you would see when hooking the camcorder up to a TV. There are no problems at this point. In fact when putting this file into iMovie there are no problems at all.

As you said I had my sequence at 16:9 I had my easy set up set for NTSC but for some reason the sequence was not set that way perhaps because I had started this project and saved it before modifying my easy setup. I deleted my sequence and made a new one and it took the right settings of NTSC 720x480 which again though is not 4:3 it is 3:2 which I think is the remainder of my problem. Although I do not see anywhere to chose a real 4:3 ratio which again perhaps comes down to not understanding as stated above. However after changing the sequence settings as mentioned my export now only takes around 5min which is much, much better and in addition the box on export that says to deinterlace works so I don't need to apply the filter.

Now Ian,
The capture device I am using is the kworld VS-USB2800D check it out here http://us.kworld-global.com/main/prod_in.aspx?mnuid=1306&;modid=10&pcid=73&ifid= 17&prodid=104 I got this before I had my Mac along time ago for this same camcorder in fact. It does not come with OS X drivers. However I found a company that provides OS X drivers for this device and aparetly several others that are based on the same chipset. The company is Echo FX check it out here http://www.echofx.com/0~index.html The product I got from them is VideoStealth.

I use the simple program that to capture the video because my capture device does not work in FCE. Unless there is another way to hook my camcorder to my computer that works with FCE. Again the video capture works great and the resulting video file looks good and has no aspec ratio problems. I simply get a 640x480 .mov file that I am trying to use in FCE.

The aspect ratio problems I am talking about depend on my sequence and export settings but generally the image is stretched vertically a bit or I have letterbox bars. I don't know why I can't just get it to output the same way as the source file which is 640x480 and has no letter boxing.

Many thanks for all the input thus far.

This article is interesting and I don't know if this explains anythig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution but one quote says "It is also worth noting that while a frame resolution may be, for example, 3:2 (720×480 NTSC), that is not what you will see on-screen (i.e. 4:3 or 16:9 depending on the orientation of the rectangular pixels)."

This article is interesting and I don't know if this explains anythig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution but one quote says "It is also worth noting that while a frame resolution may be, for example, 3:2 (720×480 NTSC), that is not what you will see on-screen (i.e. 4:3 or 16:9 depending on the orientation of the rectangular pixels)."

Thank you Tom,

Based on this do you have any suggestions that will help me? Is there another way I should be capturing my video? Or settings that I can change to make my movie come out correctly as it does in iMovie?

It seems to me that FCE is more for Video Production output to TV than for computer due to the sequence settings being limited to mostly these output types.

I got FCE as I felt I needed more that iMovie was providing. But it seems to do great for this project except I need to change the volume of the audio evenly on both right and left channels as it is only coming through on one channel and this is not available in iMovie.

Message was edited by: fishfilet

Can you recommend a way to do so since my capture device does not work in FCE? Do you know of one that will?

Thanks

Yes Thank you. You were the first to suggest I recapture and Tom Thank you so much for your help as well. I have a newer camcorder that works with FCE great it is just trying to get all of this footage off of my old Hi8 that is a problem.

It is a hard drive based camcorder AVCHD. It is a canon though VIXIA FH10.