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I am using Movie Studio Platinum 13 (essentially, light version of Sony Vegas).

I am creating a project based on mp4 files recorded on my Sony Alpha camera. These files have pixel resolution 1440x1080 and aspect ratio 16:9, which means that they are anamorphic (pixel aspect 1.333) and are stretched to 1920x1080 when playing back. All the video players I tried are playing the files with correct aspect ratio. Mediainfo tool shows the following information:

Source file info

When creating the project, I specify that I want to detect project settings from an existing file and I pick the file from the camera.

When rendering the movie, I pick Sony AVC/MVC encoder and specify the settings as in the original videos (1440x1080@30p, 1.333 pixel ratio for anamorphic aspect ratio, 25 FPS):

Info for encoder

But the final rendered movie plays back with black bars and 4:3 aspect ratio on some video players! When I inspect the media information, I see the following:

Rendered file info

The Sony AVC/MVC encoder has added "Original display aspect ratio" as 16:9 and set "Display aspect ratio" to 4:3, whereas in the source files "Display aspect ratio" was 16:9 and there was no "Original display aspect ratio" at all.

Why is Sony encoder doing this? How do I force it not to add 4:3 ratio but keep them all at 16:9 while using the same anamorphic pixel ratio for 1440 -> 1920 stretching?

2 Answers 2

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In project properties, set your pixel aspect ratio to 1.333 as well. Furthermore, make sure that when you right-click a video on your timeline that both resample is disabled, and try fiddling around with the "maintain aspect ratio" option. I have a hunch that it has got to do with these settings.

Try using different formats/encoders as well to see what effect that gives.

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I suppose some video players do not support non-square pixels, or can't read this flag from the file attributes. Why don't you use 1920x1080 format with square pixels? 1440*1.3333=1920 ;)

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  • The problematic player starts displaying it fine when I go to its settings and manually specify frame aspect ratio 16:9. I don't use the full 1920x1080 format because it seems to take considerably more time to render and I'm not sure if there is any use of it if the source videos are 1440x1080 @ 1.333 pixel aspect ratio. For the time being, let's hope that most people won't use a problematic video player (more specifically, it's MPC-HC which gets confused by that 4:3 attribute in the file info). Dec 13, 2016 at 13:13

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