Premiere, DVD's, and me

[canthlian.livejournal.com]

I'm making my first tentative forays into vidding, and seem to be running into every problem this side of the sun. One thing I'm really having problems with is DVD rips and Premiere. I can rip the video, no problems. But for some reason, Premiere doesn't seem to like importing widescreen format video. I suspect it's just me. It imports and plays in Premiere fine, but if I try to export it to WMV, RealMedia, or any other format through the media encoder, I get a black border around all the video. If it was just black bars on the top and bottom, I'd live with it, but this has bars on the sides as well, compressing the video to a small size.

The confusing thing is, if I export as a plain AVI, I have no problems. And while this does solve the problem somewhat (because I can export, re-encode to DivX to crop, and then reimport to Premiere as a new project to encode to RealMedia or whatever), it is a very roundabout solution.

Has anyone run into this sort of problem, or have any idea what I might have done wrong?


Edit: Have found a way to resolve the problem. Though it will require me to re-rip all the video I've done, it solves the issues. By using Gordian Knot as my DVD ripping program, and setting the crop to a custom aspect ratio, as opposed to a smart crop (I find a crop aspect of 1.3 works well), I can reduce a wide-screen source to a standard 4:3 output. Seeing as how very little wide-screen video is actually important to the scene, this is good for my needs.