ABSTRACT
Probably nothing in video editing causes more confusion than working with still images. Whether prepping scans of images for a video montage, or exporting still images from Final Cut for use on the Web, stills are a mess. This is all due to the sad fact that computers display their
images as a collection of square pixels, whereas video displays the images using a wide variety of rectangular pixels (see Fig. 6.1). Even in HD, there’s no consistency in pixel shape. Some formats, like RED or HDCAM SR, use square pixels. Other formats, like HDV, use a variety of differently shaped rectangles. Consequently, the pixel shapes don’t match between computer and video images. Sigh . . . its enough to drive us all nuts. This chapter has six main sections:
• Explaining this whole pixel mess • Single-layer images with no transparency • Single-layer images that you want to do moves on • Photoshop images (PSD) that contain transparency • Correcting freeze frames exported from Final Cut into
Photoshop • Thoughts on the differences between computer and video
images
in pixel shape (also called the pixel “aspect ratio”) between video and computers: video uses rectangular pixels, whereas computers use square pixels (see Fig. 6.1). Results of this mismatch are imported still images that look stretched in video. The problem is figuring out how to fix it. Here’s a good place to start: don’t confuse the shape of the
image with the shape of the pixels inside it. For instance, as Fig. 6.2 illustrates, I can fill a 4:3 shape with 12 square pixels or 15 rectangular pixels.
