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Preparing a trailer for an iOS app. I have source footage in iPad and iPhone X native resolutions (2732x2048 and 2688x1242 respectively), but they required scaled-down videos (1600x1200 and 1920x886 respectively).

Although those are theoretically the same aspect ratios, they are in fact not exactly equal. This shows up when I export from Premiere. Even though I input those specific down-scaled resolutions in the export properties, the resulting videos are slightly different: 1600x1216 and 1920x896.

I've been looking for settings to force a specific resolution - I don't really care what kind of scaling/stretching is done to achieve it (as long as there are no black bars) - but I've failed to find any.

Things I've tried:

  • changing the sequence properties and setting the exact size there, and zooming out the source clip to fit, but somehow that still came out problematic.
  • auto reframed sequence, no bingo

Any tips on this would be greatly appreciated, as I'm starting to LOSE MY MIND lol...

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In general I would set my sequence settings to the desired delivery formats, and scale my source video to fit those. I wouldn't ever squash or stretch the video, as this looks very bad, and all iOS devices these days have square pixels (ie a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1 (or some multiple thereof if you're dealing with retina displays).

In general mp4 files (if that's what you are exporting to) prefer resolutions which are divisible by 16 ( I think - although someone on here may be able to correct me).

Your options are to rescale and zoom manually, shot by shot, to accept letterboxing, or to crop some of your content. Rescaling and zooming to whatever is most relevant in each shot would be my preference.

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  • Most inter frame codecs seem to have resolution limits and put restrictions on width and height, e.g. they need to be divisible by 2 or 16. Additionally, many video players could complain about unusual resolutions even if the codec permits it. Container formats often have no relevant resolution limits or restrictions (in the end there are size limits of the resolution numbers, but they are usually really high, like 65536 pixel).
    – Matt
    Sep 20, 2020 at 13:16
  • 1200 is divisible by 2, 4 and 16, and the ratio of 4:3 is quite standard, so I'm not sure how it ends up at 1216 TBH.
    – Bilal Akil
    Sep 21, 2020 at 10:44
  • Pardon my naivety, but I don't understand how your suggestion is different to the first thing I listed in "Things I've tried" - I did set the sequence settings to what was desired, and scaled the source video to fit, shot by shot.
    – Bilal Akil
    Sep 21, 2020 at 10:45

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