From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

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Understanding pixel aspect ratio

Understanding pixel aspect ratio

From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

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Understanding pixel aspect ratio

- Pixel aspect ratio, or PAR, is a type of legacy technology. You'll still encounter it from time to time, but it's more widely used in older cameras. Certain formats when recording digital video would use a non-square pixel, meaning that the width and the height of the pixel differed. This gave greater flexibility to early manufacturers as they tried to get different sized video off of the same chip. Many cameras had an issue because they were trying to support multiple formats. Additionally, things like digital storage were a premium so they tried to maximize how much they could fit. Now, non-square pixels are pretty uncommon but you will still encounter them from time to time, particularly if you open up an older file. I've opened up a video clip here and this video is a standard definition video clip. You see it's 720 pixels across and 480 pixels. Now in this case, there's a couple of ways it could be interpreted.…

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