I’ll be the first to admit, I’m far from a polished professional when it comes to video editing. But I pride myself on providing a fine tuned representation of my footage and I work tirelessly (and often all night) to conquer various editing hurdles as I encounter them. As a result, I’ve found myself to be fairly fluent with Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
One of the issues I recently encountered was finding black vertical bars on each side of my footage, essentially disabling the 16:9 wide screen aspect ratio. The black bars and lack of width really suffocates the footage and it just doesn’t look good. I scanned countless forums and read up on this issue in various areas, to no avail. Finally, I just decided to reverse engineer other videos I’ve completed and exported that did not have the vertical black bars, and here is what I found.
When you’re in the main panel of Adobe Premiere Pro for editing your sequence, go to the top of the screen and click on: Sequence -> Sequence Settings, and then in this window click on “Editing Mode” drop down at the very top of the Sequence Settings window. You’ll see a long list of formats, basically the same that you traditionally see when you decide what format you want to export your footage in. In this list, find “AVCHD 1080p square pixel” and click on this mode. Now you’ll see “Sequence Settings” second box down from the top labeled “Video” that next to the Frame size will have a “vertical 16:9” showing.
This should solve the problem, without eroding the quality of your footage!
Cheers and good luck!
Darren