how to force a 3:1 aspect ration into 16:9 without bars?
 

I am creating motion graphic animations for display on a new LG stretch monitor. This is practically a 3:1 ratio. I have tested my HD 16x9 material on this unit and it stretches it to fit the screen perfectly, albeit, the image is stretched. So I have created a Premiere preset that allows me to edit in 3x1 screen size and the theory is I will export this to 1280x720 HD mpg file and have the image become anamorpically squeezed back to 16x9. This will then be anamorphically "stretched" back to 3:1 ratio when played on the target LCD.

The issue I am having at this point is that when exporting to anything in Adobe Media Encoder it retains the proper aspect ratio. So Adobe Media Encoder is adding black bars to the top and bottom of my clip to properly frame it, which I do not want....I want it to get squished. The box that sales scale to fit screen is greyed out all the time.

How do I force premiere not maintain the proportions at export?

Thanks.

Marty, I don't use AME, but in the encoders I do use (TMPGEnc and Procoder) the answer would be to start with a 'generic' or 'custom' preset that doesnt have any of the options disabled. Selecting an supplied preset often greys out some settings....

Graham,
Thanks for the reply. I figured out however that this option is greyed out until I crop the final output in AME. Then I can choose to have it stretch the cropped area back to the original area, which, well does me no good because it is still stuck inside the black bars that premiere adds.

I think this is a case of Premiere being too smart for it's own good. It realized that I have a 3x1 frame size project, I am choosing a 16x9 output and it automatically mattes it to maintain the proper ratio. Most of the time this would be desired, but in this case I want the actual footage anamorphically stretched so that my target TV can automatically unstretch it back to normal.

I have since found workarounds that require me exporting the entire clip and then bringing it baclk into a new project where I can manually "stretch" for 16x9 output. What a pain but a solution for now.

Marty

When I saw your original post I wanted to help but the forum registration process took a long time!

I see that you found a solution similar to the one I was going to suggest. When I did something similar it was to convert the pseudo widescreen that my old DV camera would produce (4:3 with top and bottom bars) into real 16:9. I did similar to you in that I squeezed the whole thing (to make this letterbox into a 4:3 full frame picture by scaling Y by 1.33) but instead of exporting the whole thing first I used the nested sequence feature of CS3.

You didn't say what version of Premiere you have. Basically you drag your movie sequence from the Project Window into a new sequence. This allows you to apply any filter to the whole movie. No export needed in-between.