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How can I set presets in PE7 such, that the exported video has the same hight/widh as the original?

I am shooting with KodakZi8 WVGA modus, which is 16:9 but smaller than 720p. In PE7 I only found the option to set to "widescreen" in 720p. In manual presets the height/width fields are disabled. If I export with MPEG widescreen presets, the videos are blown up to 720p and get blurry. If I select "standard", the videos are converted in 4:3.

Appreciate hints to FAQs and former threats, too (didn't found any, though)
Ralph

Welcome to Muvipix.

I am not at my editing computer right now but most export options under Share have the ability to manually set the export frame size. If you select a standard preset such as MPEG2 you should be able to go into Advanced and then under Video set the frame size.

Welcome to Muvipix, Ralph!

Are you using NTSC or PAL?

WVGA mode in the Kodak Zi8 is 848x480 pixels using a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0. That is close in size to NTSC Standard definition widescreen video which is 720x480 pixels using a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2. If you were to use an NTSC widescreen dv project preset and import your video into that, you could export it just like any normal standard definition wide screen project. And, the exported footage would essentially have the same width/height as the original, but adjusted for the rectangular pixels and interlaced. If you are using PAL, it's not quite so simple. You could still use a PAL standard definition widescreen project preset, but the wvga clips will not fill the screen unless you scale them to fit the frame size. Scaling up will reduce the quality of the video and it will be more blurry. It will only need to scale the 480 height to 576, so it won't be as blurry as scaling 480 to 720 which is what you were doing. But, it won't be as good as the original.

What export format are you trying to achieve?

Hi Bob

great hint - I tried the NTSC format and the results came out much better! If PE7 doesn't allow to set the height/width ratio manually to any given format, this is probably the best solution.

Bob wrote:What export format are you trying to achieve?

MPEG and AVI.

Raph

Hi Paul,

Paul LS wrote: If you select a standard preset such as MPEG2 you should be able to go into Advanced and then under Video set the frame size.

That's not the case in PE7 as far as I experienced. The presets are fixed to 720x575 (PAL) and 720x480 (NTSC) in the Widescreen-Mode. I didn't find a way to set my own height/with ratio.

Ralph

Hi Ralph,
You need to go into the advanced settings to make changes and then you have the option to save the settings as Custom.
Here are a couple of Screen Shots;

Hi Chuck,

thank you - I didn't realize that Frame width and height can be adjusted in certain presets (as they can't in all). This helped a lot!

I am almost there. Maybe you can help me with the next step:
No matter in what format - be it mpeg, be it quicktime - I render the video (mov), the output quality is always slightly poorer than the original. Is there a way how I can get the same quality?

When you export the video it will be rendered/transcoded to the new format. When ever you render or transcode, especially to/from compressed formats you will get some quality loss. The video bitrate or quality setting is dependant on the export preset you use, you could go into Advanced and increase the bit rate/quality to try to improve the exported video quality.

Thanks Paul LS. I thought it was similar to photos: If I have a JPEG and export it to TIF or BMP, the quality is the same, as those formats don't compress the image again.

The problem is: If I upload videos to Youtube quality gets even worse, as Youtube compresses them again. There are videos on youtube, however, that look very sharp. I uploaded a HD video taken with a Canon EOS D7 DSLR camera and rendered with high bit rate (MPEG) - and it still look far worse than other DSLR videos. Can it be that PE7's options in terms of export formats and quality are rather limited compared to other editing software?

What's the best settings for export to youtube?