Hi there,

just realized that under Debian Sid we now have Kdenlive version 0.76+svn4144-1, which announces itself as "Kdenlive 0.7.7" and regularly performs a file format conversion when re-opening an old project file. Alas, now all my DV widescreen (i.e. 16:9) clips look horizontally squeezed, as if they were in 4:3 format! (They were recorded using a PAL MiniDV camcorder set to 16:9, and all my previous projects used the DV/DVD Widescreen PAL setting. Clip frame size is 720x576, with pixel aspect ratio 1.422222, which pretty much looks like 16:9 to me...)

So, does anyone know if this is a bug or a feature?

Thanx --

tcrass

yes, that is the sample aspect ratio we use for widescreen PAL.
If you add one of these DV clips to a new project, does it look correct? IOW, is it just a project file converter problem?
If you load the converted project and then right-click and choose Reload Clip, does that fix it?

Hi ddennedy,

nope, seems not to be a conversion problem. Neither reloading a clip nor inserting a clip into a new project does fix the problem.

Do you reckon I should file (yet another ;-) ) bug report?

Regards --

tcrass

Well, in my case the problem occurs within the Kdenlive GUI already -- not only when rendering a project.

Title clips seem to have undergone funny transformations, too -- haven't had a closer look at this problem yet, hence I cannot file a detailed complaint at this point.

Regards --

tcrass

Hello,

I have the exact same problem. It is pretty blocking... Is there a known workaround? Someone working on a proper fix?

Thanks in advance.

If it is as simple as placing a raw DV clip in the Project Tree or an empty timeline, then I am not able to reproduce.
We need a bug report with exact steps to reproduce and indicate if raw DV or AVI or MOV.

Thank you very much for your answer.

Steps to reproduce the problem:
- download http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/tmp/kdenlive/video-004.avi

Note: I believe this file does not have proper aspect ratio information,
because neither mplayer nor kdenlive displays it in 16/9. However, it
seems to me that using the correct profile (in this case: DV/DVD
Widescreen PAL) should provide enough information to kdenlive.

- start kdenlive, create a new project with profile DV/DVD Widescreen PAL
and add the previously downloaded clip to the Project Tree.

In the Clip Monitor, the clip is displayed with a wrong aspect ratio: it is
stretched in the vertical direction, with black borders on the left and right
sides, whereas it should be 16/9 without borders. I had the same problem when
rendering. I believe the wrong aspect ratio is obtained with a PAR of 1
whereas PAR should be 64/45 in order to obtain 16/9 DAR from 720×576 images.

The file was obtained with the following command:

dvgrab --autosplit --opendml --format dv2 --size 0 video-

I found a workaround: if I capture the video files again, but without
"--format dv2", then the resulting .dv files are displayed with the correct
aspect ratio both by mplayer and in kdenlive (if I am not mistaken, I should
also drop --opendml in this case).

From the 2 cases, it seems to me that kdenlive uses the aspect ratio
information from input files if any, assumes square pixels otherwise, but
ignores aspect ratio information from the profile.

I am using kdenlive 0.7.6+svn4144-1 from Debian unstable.

Again, thanks for your work!

Bug reports belong in the bug tracker. I am not going to remember to check this particular thread when I next get around to tending bugs.

FYI, the profile/project-setting aspect ratio is not intended to override the sources' aspect ratio. It is the output aspect ratio.

In my case, I've grabbed 16:9 DV via kino, and reloading these files into a new instance of kino is able to detect the original 16:9 aspect ratio. I'mn talking about DV (OpenDML) in AVI container.

But I haven't found any other application (incl. kdelnlive/melt), which is able to detect the correct aspect ratio. Most tools like avidemux or mplayer show / report an undefined or 1:1 aspect pixel ratio. I have no clue how or where kino is storing the aspect ratio information. Are there any tags inside the DV stream ? As I said ... no clue. But it would be very helpfull if mlt/kdenlive could detect the 16:9 aspect ratio, too.

Would it be of advantage to work with raw DV files in case of 16:9 ?

Any hint is welcome.

Toby

Yeah, most AVIs do not contain the aspect ratio info. I had coded a workaround to this in the MLT ffmpeg plugin, but apparently it does not work now or only sometimes... I just reproduced the problem and found the bug that was introduced in v0.4.8 of MLT. Fixed in MLT Git commit 191be99.

Before I start to update and re-compile my local git tree,
I'd like to clarify: Latest git is/might be able to detect a 16:9 aspect ratio from
AVI files generated by kino ? Or are we now talking about a different issue ?

Toby

Yes, this is for any DV AVI file that does not contain aspect ratio information such as those from Kino or dvgrab and possibly others. The workaround is to grab a little bit of the raw DV data from the first frame and look at some specific bits.

Great !

Is this workaround a known practice ? How does kino detect the aspect ratio of files created by itself ? According to your statement about missing aspect ration information in DV AVI, kino must do something similar, right ?

Toby

I do not believe it is a known practice, but it is what Kino and MLT does. Well, it became broken in some 0.4.x version, but should be fixed again in 0.5.0.