Adobe Premiere Elements DVD Burning Confusion

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc48294/2' target='_blank'>http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc48294/2</a><br /><br /></div>I shot a wedding video a couple of weeks ago (yes, it's wedding season) and pulled it into Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0.2. I'm back-logged on my photo and video editing work, so I was going to burn a DVD of the raw, unedited footage for the bride and groom who are heading out to eastern Canada in a little over a week. The result were bizarre - I'll let the <a href="http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc48294/2">question I posted to the Adobe forums</a> explain it further:<br /><br /><i>"I finished a quick project using Premiere Elements 3.0.2 on Vista, and used the Export > DVD and selected the NTSC_Dolby DVD preset because I didn't shoot it in wide-screen. So why the heck is the DVD that Premiere Elements burned in 16 x 9 wide-screen format? I checked it on my PC and my DVD player hooked up to my DVD, and it's taken the 4:3 footage and stretched it to 16:9. Is this a known issue? Is there a known fix?"</i><br /><br />I finished burning this DVD just before I had to leave for the wedding I was shooting photos at because the bride who wanted the video was coming in from out of town for the same wedding I was shooting photos at. Confused yet? Imagine my frustration when I checked the DVD before heading out the door and finding it was all wrong.<br /><br />This morning I did a bit more testing to try and figure out what happened, and look what I found:<br /><br /><i>"Just for fun I burned a DVD with the NTSC_Widescreen_Dolby_DVD preset, and guess what? It worked - the DVD displayed perfectly on my 16 x 9 TV set, keeping the video content in 4:3. This makes no sense at all, but the presets are really supposed to be set based on what kind of TV set you'll be displaying it on, *NOT* the aspect ratio of the CONTENT, which is what I thought it was for. There's a certain logic to that, but not with the way the presets are named or for the way Premiere Elements exposes that choice to the user. If they re-named the presets to "NTSC Widescreen TV" and "NTSC Normal TV" it would make a bit more sense because the user at least understand the preset is asking what type of display the DVD will be played on."</i><br /><br />Adobe needs to test their software with real users before they ship it out the door - this scenario was just plain sloppy.

[Doug Johnson]

What aspect ratio was the DVD player set for? If it was set to 4x3 then everything up to that point was done properly; 4x3 material should use a 4x3 preset in Premiere Elements. With the DVD player set to 4x3, it outputs a full sized image, which is then stretched by the TV. If the DVD player was set to 16x9 and it played back a 4x3 DVD, who knows what will happen... Some DVD players don't send a "this is 4x3 content" signal to the TV, and the TV is then all too happy to stretch to fill the screen. Other TVs will display the content correctly. But 4x3 material should always use a 4x3 preset. Check your DVD on a 4x3 TV connected to a DVD player set to 4x3 to see what happens. If it displays it properly the disc as been properly mastered.

What you SHOULDN"T do is select 16x9 for the DVD unless you are working with 16x9 material, because then the software adds black bars to the left and right to fill the wide aspect ratio for the DVD. That's exactly what you don't want. Because if you then play it on a 4x3 TV you'll get black all around - top, bottom, left, and right, as the DVD/TV shrinks the picture vertically to preserve the 16x9 aspect ratio of the material.