when I export a video in Premiere Elements 14, borders appear
March 30, 2018 10:44 PM Subscribe
I've been searching Google and Adobe forums and part of the problem is in explaining this: basically, black borders appear on the sides, and the edges of layers in the film show (at least I think that's what's happening). I will upload one version to Youtube if that helps explain it.
It works better when I do it as an AVI but then the edges, which, since my video involves layers, makes it look like the edges of the layers are showing on one side.
I'm self taught and this is really my first real video, so I'm not educated on things like aspect ratio, compression, etc. And I have this video due for an art class next week! help!
I've tried exporting as Mp4 (worse in some ways) AVI regular and widescreen, and Mpeg.
I'm not even sure how to frame this question for Adobe forums and figure you guys could answer this quicker anyway.
I'm self taught and this is really my first real video, so I'm not educated on things like aspect ratio, compression, etc. And I have this video due for an art class next week! help!
I've tried exporting as Mp4 (worse in some ways) AVI regular and widescreen, and Mpeg.
I'm not even sure how to frame this question for Adobe forums and figure you guys could answer this quicker anyway.
How many pixels wide and how many high are each of your source clips?
How many pixels wide and how many high is your final edit?
posted by flabdablet at 10:49 PM on March 30, 2018
How many pixels wide and how many high is your final edit?
posted by flabdablet at 10:49 PM on March 30, 2018
Response by poster: where do I look to get that info? Not sure
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:58 PM on March 30, 2018
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:58 PM on March 30, 2018
Response by poster: Don't know if this answers the question, but for the source clips the Aspect Ratio is 1.0. Image size is 640 x 360. I don't see anything in the properties that specifies pixel width and height by name, so hopefully that's the image size.
Exported looks like 720 x480. Would I just change that to 640x360 then?
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:12 PM on March 30, 2018
Exported looks like 720 x480. Would I just change that to 640x360 then?
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:12 PM on March 30, 2018
I am not an Adobe Elements expert so I can't answer, but I feel like the google search term you want is "black bars" rather than referring to it as a border. A border would be a uniform element around all four sides. Maybe that google search will give you some ideas? Sounds to me like the video dimensions aren't set properly. The Adobe forums can surely give you the exact advice you need.
posted by AppleTurnover at 1:00 AM on March 31, 2018
posted by AppleTurnover at 1:00 AM on March 31, 2018
OK, so, aspect ratios: pixels are very nearly always square. So a picture that's 640 pixels wide and 360 pixels high is 640/360 = 64/36 = 32/18 = 16/9 times as wide as it is high, and that 16/9 factor is the picture's aspect ratio.
The format you're exporting to is 720x480, which has an aspect ratio of 720/480 = 72/48 = 36/24 = 18/12 = 3/2 = 1.5. This is the same as the aspect ratio of a 6" x 4" film camera print. It's a very unusual aspect ratio for video.
Wikipedia has a good article on aspect ratio that includes examples of standard ratios for various picture formats and a section on current video standards.
To avoid a stretched or squashed look, changing the size of a picture requires that it be scaled by an equal amount in both horizontal and vertical directions. Doing that gives the scaled picture the same aspect ratio as the original.
Most TVs have a setting that lets you scale old-school 4:3 programming unequally, to fill your 16:9 widescreen. It looks terrible. Most people only ever do it by accident.
There are really only two ways to change a picture's aspect ratio without making stuff inside it look squished. You can cut parts of it away, or you can add padding to the edges. If you scale to a new aspect ratio without doing that, the picture has to distort.
For example, if you were to scale your 640x360 source clips to make them 480 pixels high, you'd end up with a picture 480 × 16/9 = 854 pixels wide. This is wider than the 720x480 output frame you're trying to fit them in, so you'd need to crop a total of 854 - 720 = 134 pixels off the sides to make them fit.
On the other hand, scaling a 640x360 source clip to make it 720 pixels wide would make it 720 ÷ 16/9 = 405 pixels high. Fitting that into a 720x480 output frame would then require 480 - 405 = 75 pixels of vertical padding.
If you force video processing software to do implicit scaling between different aspect ratios then it will generally pick the padding method rather than the cropping method, in order to destroy the least amount of image content. It's conventional to centre the scaled picture between padding areas of solid black. So in the second case you'd end up with a 720x37 pixel black bar at the top and a 720x38 pixel black bar at the bottom, an effect called letterboxing.
If you were then to upload the resulting 720x480 video to YouTube, then YouTube would scale it again because YouTube only supports video with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Any YouTube video that's 480 pixels high (480p format) is forced to be 480 × 16/9 = 854 pixels wide. What you're uploading is only 720 pixels wide. So YouTube will add a 67x480 vertical black bar left and right (pillarboxing) to pad it to the right width. Now you have a windowboxed video with black bars on all four sides - top and bottom from your own video processing software, and left and right from YouTube's.
Yes, it would be better if YouTube could detect that what you were uploading had already been padded with black bars to make it fit in its 720x480 frame, and strip that padding off before doing its own scaling. But it doesn't. From YouTube's point of view, if you're uploading video with black bars then it's going to show those black bars to your audience, even if it has to add more black bars of its own to make them fit.
So that's aspect ratio. The takeaway here is that you need to pick an aspect ratio for your final export that suits your final display device(s), and work consistently to that. Using 16:9 will work nicely on any widescreen TV and on YouTube, so that's probably your best bet.
If you've got source clips that aren't already 16:9, perhaps because they came off a standard definition camera that records at 4:3, and you want to fill the final frame with them, you'll need to choose for yourself which parts of them to crop away before layering them onto the final video.
In your case, your source clips are already 16:9, so all you need to do is pick a format for your final edit that's also 16:9. If none of your sources have higher resolution than 640x360 and you're not doing stuff like tiling multiple sources in your output, then there's no point picking a higher resolution than 640x360 (Wide 360p) for your output either.
Does that help?
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 AM on March 31, 2018
The format you're exporting to is 720x480, which has an aspect ratio of 720/480 = 72/48 = 36/24 = 18/12 = 3/2 = 1.5. This is the same as the aspect ratio of a 6" x 4" film camera print. It's a very unusual aspect ratio for video.
Wikipedia has a good article on aspect ratio that includes examples of standard ratios for various picture formats and a section on current video standards.
To avoid a stretched or squashed look, changing the size of a picture requires that it be scaled by an equal amount in both horizontal and vertical directions. Doing that gives the scaled picture the same aspect ratio as the original.
Most TVs have a setting that lets you scale old-school 4:3 programming unequally, to fill your 16:9 widescreen. It looks terrible. Most people only ever do it by accident.
There are really only two ways to change a picture's aspect ratio without making stuff inside it look squished. You can cut parts of it away, or you can add padding to the edges. If you scale to a new aspect ratio without doing that, the picture has to distort.
For example, if you were to scale your 640x360 source clips to make them 480 pixels high, you'd end up with a picture 480 × 16/9 = 854 pixels wide. This is wider than the 720x480 output frame you're trying to fit them in, so you'd need to crop a total of 854 - 720 = 134 pixels off the sides to make them fit.
On the other hand, scaling a 640x360 source clip to make it 720 pixels wide would make it 720 ÷ 16/9 = 405 pixels high. Fitting that into a 720x480 output frame would then require 480 - 405 = 75 pixels of vertical padding.
If you force video processing software to do implicit scaling between different aspect ratios then it will generally pick the padding method rather than the cropping method, in order to destroy the least amount of image content. It's conventional to centre the scaled picture between padding areas of solid black. So in the second case you'd end up with a 720x37 pixel black bar at the top and a 720x38 pixel black bar at the bottom, an effect called letterboxing.
If you were then to upload the resulting 720x480 video to YouTube, then YouTube would scale it again because YouTube only supports video with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Any YouTube video that's 480 pixels high (480p format) is forced to be 480 × 16/9 = 854 pixels wide. What you're uploading is only 720 pixels wide. So YouTube will add a 67x480 vertical black bar left and right (pillarboxing) to pad it to the right width. Now you have a windowboxed video with black bars on all four sides - top and bottom from your own video processing software, and left and right from YouTube's.
Yes, it would be better if YouTube could detect that what you were uploading had already been padded with black bars to make it fit in its 720x480 frame, and strip that padding off before doing its own scaling. But it doesn't. From YouTube's point of view, if you're uploading video with black bars then it's going to show those black bars to your audience, even if it has to add more black bars of its own to make them fit.
So that's aspect ratio. The takeaway here is that you need to pick an aspect ratio for your final export that suits your final display device(s), and work consistently to that. Using 16:9 will work nicely on any widescreen TV and on YouTube, so that's probably your best bet.
If you've got source clips that aren't already 16:9, perhaps because they came off a standard definition camera that records at 4:3, and you want to fill the final frame with them, you'll need to choose for yourself which parts of them to crop away before layering them onto the final video.
In your case, your source clips are already 16:9, so all you need to do is pick a format for your final edit that's also 16:9. If none of your sources have higher resolution than 640x360 and you're not doing stuff like tiling multiple sources in your output, then there's no point picking a higher resolution than 640x360 (Wide 360p) for your output either.
Does that help?
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 AM on March 31, 2018
for the source clips the Aspect Ratio is 1.0.
That, by the way, will be the aspect ratio of the pixels themselves rather than that of the whole video frame. A pixel aspect ratio of 1 just means that the pixels making up your 640x360 source clips are indeed square, and that all you need to do to figure out the aspect ratio of the clip as a whole is divide the width in pixels by the height in pixels.
Some video formats (notably DVD) store video in a format that doesn't have square pixels. I suggest that you do your best to forget about that until you actually stub a toe on it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:20 AM on March 31, 2018
That, by the way, will be the aspect ratio of the pixels themselves rather than that of the whole video frame. A pixel aspect ratio of 1 just means that the pixels making up your 640x360 source clips are indeed square, and that all you need to do to figure out the aspect ratio of the clip as a whole is divide the width in pixels by the height in pixels.
Some video formats (notably DVD) store video in a format that doesn't have square pixels. I suggest that you do your best to forget about that until you actually stub a toe on it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:20 AM on March 31, 2018
Response by poster: Just woke up and havent' yet read the above stuff, but here's the upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn-k1oUyfIc&feature=youtu.be. The major borders left and right in black i can live with, but the slim glitchy lines on the left aren't good. they look like a definite glitch.
It starts in around :57-1:01. It might not look like much on a smalls screen but it's very visible on my tv and will be projected onto a wall so it will be huge in presentation.
Because it will be projected in darkness, I'm ok if I can't get around the black bars on either side, it's the glitch in overlap/layer? part on the left side that isn't acceptable. Thanks for your answers, I'll delve into it now.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:58 PM on March 31, 2018
It starts in around :57-1:01. It might not look like much on a smalls screen but it's very visible on my tv and will be projected onto a wall so it will be huge in presentation.
Because it will be projected in darkness, I'm ok if I can't get around the black bars on either side, it's the glitch in overlap/layer? part on the left side that isn't acceptable. Thanks for your answers, I'll delve into it now.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:58 PM on March 31, 2018
Response by poster: D'oh! something went way awry with that upload, Ignore that it dissolves into weird pink glitch. The glitch I'm talking about is minor compared to that and comes in at :57. I have no idea what happened with that funky upload.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:07 PM on March 31, 2018
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:07 PM on March 31, 2018
If the glitch you're talking about is the brighter stripe down the left hand side, that looks to me like the result of a layer that's getting pillarboxed before being overlaid. Check the sizes of all your layers and make sure they're the same.
posted by flabdablet at 1:11 PM on March 31, 2018
posted by flabdablet at 1:11 PM on March 31, 2018
Response by poster: I thought that's what it was too but so far havent' been able to catch it. will try again thanks
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:32 PM on March 31, 2018
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 1:32 PM on March 31, 2018
Response by poster: thanks again guys for your help.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:59 PM on March 31, 2018
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:59 PM on March 31, 2018
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posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:48 PM on March 30, 2018