Monday, December 27, 2010

QuickTime Pro's "Conform aperture to" setting

In case you're not quite confused enough Apple has updated it's knowledge base article on QuickTime Pro's Conform Aperture To setting.

  • Clean: The recommended setting for most video. Crops the video to the area of frame free from digitization artifacts and applies pixel aspect ratio correction. A 4:3 DV NTSC track appears as 640 x 480; a 16:9 DV NTSC track appears as 853 x 480.
  • Production: Used for video production. Shows all pixels in the the video including the edges and corrects for pixel aspect ratio. A 4:3 DV NTSC track appears as 654 x 480; a 16:9 DV NTSC track appears as 873 x 480."
Got that?

Clean 16:9 DV NTSC is 853x480 while Production's is 873x480. Likewise Clean's 4:3 DV NTSC is 640x480 while Production is 654x480.

There. Hopefully you're a little more confused than before. I get confused over this stuff all the time. Don't even start thinking about what happens when a client plays these with something other than QuickTime Pro...just...don't. And don't think about Square vs non-square pixels either. Seriously. Don't.