Subject: Unwanted stretching of 4:3 digital movies imported to iMovie5 and iMovie6 from camera
To everybody who needs more clarity on aspect ratio problems:
Working with iMovie 5.02 and QuicktimePro 7.04, all my final playback of completed movies occurred with aspect ratios going out of whack, even movies I had created with previous iMovie versions.
Starting with a Sony TRV350 digital movie camera of a 4:3 picture aspect ratio, the resultant film was imported to iMovie5 (and this was also tried with iMovie6), and as long as the clips were still in the clips pane, their aspect ratio remained satisfactory at 720 x 540, but as soon as clips are moved to the Time Line they loose about 10% of their height.
This can be verified by duplicating the frame of a clip in the clips Pane as a "Still Frame", and exporting it to the Desktop as a .jpeg picture. Highlight the .Jpeg on the desktop, open “Desktop/File/GetInfo” and select change to “Open with Preview”. Then open (with Preview), go to “Window/Document Info”, and it will read the Image Size as (with my camera input) 720 x 528 pixels, which proves the aspect ratio in the imported clips is approximately 4:3.
Since (720 : 4) x 3 = 540 , there are only 12 pixels difference from true 4:3 (they seem to get lost in conversion to .jpeg)
Now if we go back to iMovie 05, drag the same clip into the time line, select it to see it in the Editing Window of iMovie, where it can be seen with the distortion already having occurred. This distortion could be described as horizontal stretching or vertical squeezing.
To find out find out how much distortion and where it is, go to “Edit/Create Still Frame” and a still frame of the distorted clip is added to the end of the Time Line. Drag it from there to the Clips Pane, and from the clips Pane to the Desktop. Click on it, and it will open with Quicktime Player.
Then go to “QuickTime Player/View/Actual Size”, and then to “QuickTime Player/Window/Show Movie Info” and it will display 720 x 480 as “Normal Size” as well as “Actual Size”.
In other words the picture has been flattened vertically so much, that its 540 pixel height taken by the camera has been reduced to 480 pixels, which is a loss of 60 pixels from its actual vertical camera taken picture height, and the original 4:3 ratio has been changed by this defective software to a 3:2 ratio. This is a loss of more than 10% of the height of the picture.
When both the Preview .jpeg and iMovie clip.dv are opened side by side on the Desktop, and compared, there appears to be nothing missing or clipped off at either the top or bottom of either picture, which is proof that the iMovie in the derived .dv pic has been vertically distorted by the new iMovie software, squeezing the height of the picture approximately 10%, and whoever walks around in the film looks dwarfed and distorted as if reflected in a fun house mirror.
Having an old version iMovie 2.1.2 on my System 9.2.2, I then tried the same procedure with it, in the same manner, except that I got the actual pixel info by opening the still and the jpeg with Adobe Photoshop. They both returned 640 x 480 pixels a true 4:3 ratio.
I almost bought iMovie6, but was wise enought to bring my camera to the store to try the same procedures on their demo computer loaded with OS 10.4 and iMovie6, only to find that this software is not any better as it also changes your movies to fun house pictures.
Since I have several hard drives on my Mac to accomodate all my movie work, I decided to reload iMovie 4.02 on one of the drives. I tried the same procedure of down-loading and checking the picture aspect ratio with iMovie 4, and it works perfect, keeping the aspect ratio at 4:3 loading it loads it as 640 x 480 pixels.
Since then I only use iMovie4 to import movies from my camera, and to do the editing. Once that has been done I export to another hard drive on my Mac that has iMovie5 on it. There I open it with iMovie 5, share it with iDVD5 with which I then further process it with the extra menus, and create a final disk image. The image can then be processed into a DVD with either iDVD, or Toast. The latter gives all sorts of extra options, and allows dbl. layer DVDs, etc.
If you have QuicktimePro, there is another way to force iMovie 5 into a 4: 3 ratio, by a rather difficult step by step procedure, given in iMovie5 Help. After you have succeeded to execute these steps given in Help, you have to wait for a long time for the Quicktime movie to recreate itself and change the aspect ratio. Once that is done you will may see a change in the iMovie editing screen which will change to 4:3 aspect ratio once you start playing the movie in the editing window.
However I found that it does not always work, and furthermore, it is often right back to the old 3:2 aspect problem if the iMovieProject is reloaded. I have not been able to figure out why this occurs.
The final answer is that both iMovie5 and iMovie6 are not
able to maintain the 4:3 camera aspect imported, no matter whether run on Panther or Tiger OS.
This problem has been discussed since January 2005, in many different MAC oriented forums and there seems no solution other than working with the previous iMovie 4 software to maintain correct aspect ratio import.
I think an update to iMovie 5 and iMovie 6 is overdue.
Since Apple has not even had the courtesy to acknowledge that they created this problem, it seems now unlikely that they will still come up with an update.
Nobody from Apple has provided us (their customers) with any hope in this respect.
