Vertical cellphone video proxy: horizontally squished

[jqwerty]

I'm working on a project shot on many different cellphones, most in landscape and a few in portrait orientation. Creating proxies for the vertical footage isn't working – they appear onscreen squished horizontally (two black bars on left and right). 

After reading some posts online, I created a custom encoding and ingesting preset in media encoder to handle the vertical video (dimensions of w=1080 h=1920) to create the proxies, but they STILL appear squished. 

Strangely, if I navigate to the proxy folder and import the proxy as a stand-alone video, it displays correctly so maybe there is something with the mapping of the full-size video file to the proxy that is making the aspect look like this? For now I won't use proxies for these videos, but it's slowing down my workflow a lot and I wish I could resolve it. 

[R Neil Haugen]

This would depend on how you have Premiere set to apply images to a timeline ... no scaling, Set To Frame-size, or Scale To Frame-size. And be affected by the resolution (frame-size) of the sequence versus the individual clip.

Neil

[jqwerty]

I forgot to mention, this is already happening when I preview the clip in the Source Monitor. Is there a global setting to address how Premiere presents all video images that I'm missing?

[POwens]

I've got exactly the same problem creating proxies in Premiere - proxies are fine for landscape format, but portrait format proxies become vertically narrower than the source, even with all the ME settings as "same as source".  BUT, if I use exactly the same ingest setting 'Apple Prores Proxy' and create the proxies within ME, they are fine.

[POwens]

Can no longer edit the above comment, sao adding some more info.   When I attach these externally built proxies to the source clips in Premiere, I'm learning that some work, some don't.   All of them seem fine outside Premiere, i.e not squeezed.  But some of them, when attached in Premiere, are squeezed again.   It feels like different phone are using different pixel aspect ratios, perhaps?

[R Neil Haugen]

Maybe? Would be nice to see a MediaInfo "Tree" view of the specs of the original files, comparing data from files that work to those that don't.

Neil

[POwens]

Never let it be said!   Here's the source and proxy Media Info Tree view.

[POwens]

The above files are some of the ones that "don't work" - the proxy looks the same as the source in Cineplay and Finder, but when attached as a proxy in Premiere, the proxy is 'squeezed' narrower than the source.

[POwens]

And then there's these two, which "do work", i.e. creating proxies in PP didn't work for these, but when I made them in ME, then attached them as proxies, they look the same as the source.