Trouble with Zoom Tool, Premiere Elements 15

[PauleyMak]

Hello,

I am making a video with different project setting than project assets in reguard to aspect ratio. My project settings are 640x640 and my source media is 1920x1080. I have tried to use the pan and zoom tool in the adjustments toolbar as well as the crop tool in FX bar. I can use my mouse and free transform the video by hand, but when I render the video for playback, the aspect ratio is off with two black bars on the side. It seem that the program is trying to keep the regular aspect of the project and not letting me just fit my video to the project settings. any help would be appreciated.

-Thanks

[Steve Grisetti]

How did you set your Project Settings to 640x640? There's no preset for that.

Based on the description of your project, is it possible it's actually a 1920x1080 project?

Can you post a screen capture of the Motion properties keyframe control workspace when you try to create a pan & zoom?

(BTW, what is the media you're panning and zooming over? Is it photos or video?)

[PauleyMak]

Firstly I check to see what type of files the presets were. Come to find out I could edit the sequence preset in Notepad. I chose a standard NTSC 48k Standard file and edited the '<VideoPixelAspectRatio>' to 640x640. Then I found another line of code '<VideoFrameSize>' and changed that to 640x640.

The two new lines of code are as follows:

<VideoPixelAspectRatio>640,640</VideoPixelAspectRatio>

<VideoFrameSize>0,0,640,640</VideoFrameSize>

From there I saved the file as a new preset with the same file extension as the others, placed it in a new folder in the NTSC preset main folder and started Elements 15.Started a new project and selected my newly custom preset.

Elements 15 then started with the correct 640x640 (1:1) aspect ratio. It seems to work alright. I noticed when I zoomed in on my media then rendered the whole timeline that the aspects were off.

The work around would be to make your movie, then manually change the video to fit the 640x640 screen size.

Its too bad that you cant choose your own project size. I was making a movie for my instagram account using GoPro mp4 files.

[Ann Bens]

Post a screenshot of the frame with the black bars and what is the resolution of that frame.

Which export setting is used.

Dont think Elements is designed to do stuff like this:

You need something like Premiere Pro.

[Steve Grisetti]

Looks like a great hack, Pauley -- but unfortunately not without its liabilities, I guess.