I think it all has to do with your personal monitor resolution, as far as the YouTube screen. Say your monitor is 1920 by 1080 or something, but mine is 1440 by 900.If you made your video in 1920 by 2080, it would take up the whole screen on your computer, but since on mine it's a different aspect ratio, there's some black space on the sides. You understand I'm plugging random numbers in for the resolution (except for my monitor) but I believe the concept is still the same.

Hm, well, for one of my animations (this one, I think), I exported my final movie in 1280 by 720, and that seemed to take up the entire screen. And I think 800 by 600 isn't the best quality to work with, especially when you want 720p. 720p means 1280 by 720 I believe, but I just took a quick glance at a wikipedia article, so I might be a bit off in the definition.

Technically speaking, since you are filming at 800x600, you would need to crop the footage to 800x448. Then you could export as NTSC DV widescreen at 1280x720p or 1920x1080p however they do not affect your quality of the film at all.

-Tejas VIM

Don't alter the original footage unless it's for creative reasons. You'll be chopping off the quality by scaling it up.

Does it matter whether I crop the video?

Does this look stretched? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlFa7WxZm-o

Last edited by Eddie (April 15, 2011 (01:42pm))

So it looks bad?

but it looks stretched as in bad stretched....?

Well, I filmed at 1600x1200 and it exported at 1280x720 I don't know what went wrong!