Hello everyone, I am new to this forum.

I know my question sounds a bit stupid but it really keeps my hands tired since I started to use Sony Vegas 7.0e yesterday. I’ve gone through the whole forum but didn’t find an exact way to solve this stunt. So any comments will be highly appreciated!

Here is my situation in brief:
I’ve got a Sony DCR-HC94E MiniDV PAL camcorder and I normally shoot in 16: widescreen model 25p progressive format. I think this camera shoots in True Widescreen model. [If you're sure it doesn't, please let me know ASAP, thank you] Well, I am a casual user so before I got my hands on Vegas I simply used Windows Movie Maker to capture and do some easy editing over my footage.

Problem 1: no matter which software (WMM or Vegas) I use to capture the raw material from the tape using Firewire, I got a horizontally squeezed image if I try to playback the raw .avi file on my PC. Is this normal? The footage however appears in widescreen in the preview window during capture in both applications. Why the PAL footage are always captured in 4:3, 720x576 even if they are shoot in genuine 16:9 model? And as I said, I can’t play the capture raw .avi files in the correct 16:9 aspect ratio. What can I do?

Problem 2: OK, not to mention the raw .avi files. If I use WMM to edit the original widescreen footage and then save the movie to PC in 16:9 format then I would get a .wmv file. This is interesting because right-click the file/properties/summary/advanced, the width and height are still in 4:3, 720x576 format and even the thumbnails confirms this as well. But if I play the file in Windows Media Player, then it starts in 4:3 aspect ratio but then it stretches into 16:9 to suit the right aspect ratio very quickly, in 0.2 second perhaps. Now, if I check the file properties again but in the WMP’s playlist, then it says video size: 720x576, aspect ratio: 5:4 actual, 16:9 displayed. It sounds like WMM adds a display flag into the file so Media Player could recognise and then adjust screen ratio to play correctly. Is this normal, did you guys get the same situation?

Problem 3: this one associates with Sony Vegas 7.0. I could capture footage from tape without any problem. The preview screen adjusts to 16:9 during capture automatically. But problems arise when I try to render files. By studying many threads in this forum, I have chosen the PAL DV Widescreen template/720x576/pixel aspect1.4568/25PAL frame rate under File/Project Properties in Vegas + check Maintain aspect ratio on the timeline + Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox) before I finally click the Save button. (Caution: it looks fine in the Simulate Device Aspect Ratio preview, no black bars at all.) But no matter what I do to mess up various combinations of settings here and there, the final outputs (.avi, .wmv, etc) are always in 4:3 even if I mandated output to be PAL DV Widescreen. It’s very irritating to watch widescreen videos in a horizontally squeezed manner!

But I finally figured out two ways to get rid of the problem.
First is to change the Project Property back into PAL DV (normal) and render the output normally. But this will give me a 4:3 file with two artificial black bars above and below. Not good enough, is it?

Second is to keep the Widescreen PAL selection under Project Property, but to render it to some mandated widescreen preset, such as HDV intermediate outputs. Then the video playback will be normal, but this is at the expense of creating extremely large file and dramatically long rendering time.

So could anyone here offer me a hand? Am I making some stupid mistakes? I am totally confused now. Vegas 7.0e is not that old and it should have the capability to render widescreen PAL footage, shouldn’t it? So, please if you have any idea do me favour. Any help will be highly appreciated!

[redsox_mark]

I can confirm the HC94 is true widescreen, and also that Vegas can render widescreen correctly. Using a PAL DV Widescreen template is correct.

You don't seem to be doing anything wrong; I can't explain why it isn't working though.

Thank you very much for ur reply, sir!
That's also what I am thinking, isn't it weird? I've followed whatever I possibly can and tried every possible reasonable combinations of Project Properties and outputs....but still failed to render output files in a proper widescreen format. I got some suggestions elsewhere, nice people asked me to mess up with the Pixel Ratios, and sort of pull-down because of the oversized CCD in my DCR-HC94E. This causes me headache, I will again need to mess up further and keep this thread alive for further discussions.

I am sure I am not the only one here using Vegas to edit widescreen footage shot using Sony widescreen PAL DVs. But no one mentions such problem in this forum....doesn't it sound weird, too?