Back borders, pixel aspect, HD, SD, and Adobe CS 5.5

This is well documented except for the solution. ( and I will be concentrating on PAL here ).

In the days of Premiere CS3 we were blissfully ignorant. Standard television was 4:3 aspect ratio and wide screen was 16:9. HD telly was 16:9 - all was well.

In premiere, as with other software, if you wanted to make some computer generated footage you would make it 1024x576 (576 for the number of vertical lines in PAL and 1024 because 1024:576 is 16:9) Magic. Also of course HD was 16:9 so you could just scale it down.

This all changed with CS4 ( and the chap on this forum suggests it was coincident with a juicey contract with the BBC). Because if you do the boring maths, 4:3 is not really 4:3, and neither is 16:9.

So SD widescreen is actually a bit wider. 1.46:1 and you are suppose to crop 13 pixels of the top and bottom of you picture. Or, as has been stated elsewhere, widescreen SD is 1050x576...

As one non BBC engineer said to me once, ' you can do it the right way or you can do it the BBC way'.

In the end, as someone who is producing finished material destined for DVD and playable on modern digital devices capable of playing right up to the picture edge (no need for the safe zone), I just want it to work. I don't want to suddenly have thin black borders at the sides (which will show up on Youtube and Vimeo) for the sake of some engineer being right. The software should be there to enable you, not to prove a point.

Forum contributors have been posting how this is not a problem with other editors and apparently there is a button in encore CS6 which corrects the issue. But there is still the problem in Premiere as all the presets for PAL will give you the 1.46:1 aspect.

My workflow is thus:
I work in true 16:9 (usually HD) on my project. When I render for youtube or vimeo I render in true 16:9 using the custom settings in Premiere. These heretical services don't seem to mind this.

When exporting to Encore I take in the rendered footage and scale it (for HD) by 53.4 vertically and 54.7 horizontally. (My reasoning here is whatever the BBC says my telly is 16.9 and the telly will stretch the picture accordingly when dealing with the non square pixel aspect ratio). In the end its 26 pixels and its up to you if you want to loose it. Scaling the vertical by .5 will give a better result)

I then export to Encore so that the Scaling and the transcoding are done in one step thus reducing the number of times the footage is mangled.

Well that's my solution and for people who don't want / can't afford to upgrade to CS6 I hope it helps.