Can I make all of the aspect ratios of all of my project assets the same?

[Austino_BonBeeno]

I just finished creating a 55 minute video, but I've been trying to work through a problem for hours before uploading to YouTube, and I still haven't figured it out. Basically, the video fills up the entire work monitor I see in premiere, but after exporting, there were giant black bars are the sides. I quickly found out that all I needed to do was change the resolution of my video to 1280 x 720. Now most of the video fills up the entire screen, except a lot of the still images I use in the video still have black bars. There is a lot of keyframing (like panning, zooming, etc.) done on these still images, so this aspect ratio change screws all of those animations up. The entire project is comprised of video clips and still images I downloaded off YouTube and Google. None of the images or footage is filmed from a camera or anything. When I was creating the project, I thought as long as the monitor box was filled completely (even extending the video past those little "safe line" things), there would be no black bars or anything, but I guess I am wrong? I guess what's happening is I have a bunch of different aspect ratios that are not the same being used in this video and I can't have that. So is there a way to easily, like, neutralize all of the images and clips in my project to a single aspect ratio? I have gone through a lot of threads, but none of the questions really apply to my specific situation. Please help.

Thanks.

[Ann Bens]

Post screenshot of project settings and export settings.

How did you change the resolution of your video?

And what was it before you changed it?

You cannot just change the aspect ratio (of the clips?) whithout getting into trouble.

You need to be a bit more specific.

[Austino_BonBeeno]

Sorry for the late response. I changed the resolution of the entire project to 1280 x 720 from whatever the default was. As for the clips and images, I just resized them with the scaling dragger until they filled up the entire screen.

[Ann Bens]

What you are seeing is correct.

Project/Footage is 4:3, export is 16:9 It will never fill the screen.

If you want 4:3 footage to fill into a 16:9 window you will have to start with a 16:9 project.

Drop the 4:3 footage in and scale it up to make it fit.

This means you will loose top and bottom of the image. (you can drag the image up or down for better composition)

Its either one or the other. Cannot have it both ways.

edit:

Also your project is 640x480 and you are exporting to 1280x720 which means your are enlarging the image twice the size,

which will result in image quality loss.

[williebegoode]

Let me add to Ann Bens' points. If you are using images downloaded from the Web, you need to first use Photoshop Elements (or some other photo editing tool) and make sure everything is saved to jpg or gif format. You will find that png files will greatly increase the file size of your project. You also need to work out the relative sizes, as Ann pointed out; however, do all that work before loading them into Premiere Elements.
   One practice that's helped me a lot is to create png files for editing since they maintain layers, and once they are completed re-save them as jpg files. If you want to change one of the jpg file, you can open the png file, make the changes and then re-save as a jpg file. Anyway, here's a recent video using a 970 X 800 graphic with the default size of the mobile phone video on my YouTube channel: #123 Gateway to High Horology: Jaeger-LeCoultre Under $10k - YouTube  that will illustrate how I handle aspect ratio.