Hi,

I am a completely new subscriber and this is my very first post, so please forgive me if this is a common problem which is documented elsewhere ... I have looked around and searched for ages, finding nothing.

All of my clips originally have a 640px display size and most have 16:9 display ratios (the rest have 4:3 display ratios).

I've tried loading many clips with virtually every default kdenlive profile, but been unable to get any 16:9 clip to display at the proper aspect in the clip monitor or to render at the correct aspect. These 16:9 originals are squeezed into what looks like a 4:3 space at the centre of the clip monitor.

4:3 originals seem to display at the correct aspect in the clip monitor, although all the default 4:3 profiles are larger or smaller than 640x480, so they have black bands on all four sides when using larger screen size profiles.

Most default profiles have an 'aspect ratio' (pixel aspect?) of 1:1, so I guess that either my original clips have a different pixel aspect (unlikely) or they contain some metadata about the display aspect which kdenlive is ignoring.

Although every media player (mplayer, vlc, totem, xine, kaffeine, etc ...) correctly displays the originals it may be no coincidence that avidemux also fails to detect their aspect ratio (lavc?).

I'm guessing that I need to do one or both of two things:

1. Create new profiles for 640px wide images with different pixel and display aspects
2. Re-encode every movie I have before editing it

Obviously, I would be a bit surprised and quite dismayed if the latter were required.

So, what should be my next step?

Although I can query mplayer et al. to tell me what they know about the 'problem' files, I'd appreciate some guidance on what specific parameters I should be looking for and how to create a profile from scratch.

N.B. I've been using vi and *nix for 20+ years (so no fear of the command line or text editing), but my knowledge of video fundamentals is poor.

Thanks.

The FFmpeg libs that Kdenlive is using was unable to determine your videos proper aspect ratio. You can work around this by dobule-clicking it in the Project Tree to open the Clip Properties, click the Advanced tab, and click "Force pixel aspect ratio" checkbox. Next, you need to define the sample aspect ratio, but I can not tell you what that is without both the horizontal and vertical resolution. You try this formula: height/width * 16/9.