Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV
by Leland Davis
on
Apr 7, 2008 at 7:22:38 pm
I have a video that I have shot and edited in 4:3.
I'm trying to burn it onto a DVD. It plays fine on my monitor, but when I put it in my DVD player and watch it on my HDTV the picture looks short and fat.
What settings do I need to use either in export of the video from FCP or within DVD Studio to get it to look right on an HDTV?
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Alan Okey on Apr 7, 2008 at 8:55:47 pm
You don't have any control over this from within the DVD authoring process, it is strictly an issue of how the HDTV is set up.
The HDTV must be switched into 4:3 mode in order to view the material at its proper aspect ratio. This would apply to 4:3 broadcast/cable/satellite programming as well as to your 4:3 DVD.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Alan Okey on Apr 7, 2008 at 9:40:14 pm
In DVD Studio ProYou can choose how 16:9 anamorphic-encoded video is displayed on 4:3 TVs. If you select "4:3 letterboxed," the 16:9 footage will be displayed on a 4:3 TV with black bars above and below the footage. "4:3 pan & scan" will show the 16:9 footage full-frame, but with the sides chopped off. These options are merely flags that tell the DVD player hardware how to display the image.
There are several links in the chain that can affect how the image is ultimately displayed. The first is how the footage is compressed. You can encode 16:9 footage as anamorphic 16:9, and DVD Studio Pro will recognize it as anamorphic footage and apply the proper horizontal stretch on playback, whether on a computer or on a properly configured DVD player connected to a 16:9 TV. 4:3 footage does not need any special encoding.
The second step is to make sure that the DVD player video output is set up properly. DVD players have a menu setting that selects whether a 4:3 or 16:9 television is connected.
If the DVD player is set to 4:3 when connected to a 16:9 television:
-4:3 material will be stretched horizontally
-16:9 anamorphic material will be displayed either as squashed vertically with black bars above and below or as horizontally stretched pan & scan 4:3
-letterboxed 4:3 material will be displayed stretched horizontally with black bars above and below.
If the DVD player is set to 16:9 when connected to a 4:3 TV:
-16:9 anamorphic material will fill the screen and appear vertically stretched
-4:3, 4:3 letterboxed and 4:3 pan & scan material will be displayed properly
Finally, there is the aspect ratio settings on the TV itself. Most HDTVs have several settings, including 4:3, 16:9, and various zoomed/stretched modes. Some HDTVs have circuits that attempt to guess the proper aspect ratio setting by analyzing the content being played. They are quite often wrong.
You have no control over how someone else's DVD player and TV are set up. If your 4:3 DVD isn't being displayed properly, then chances are, neither is 4:3 programming from other 4:3 DVDs or from 4:3 broadcast/cable/satellite. The best you can do is to author your DVD properly and hope that the intended viewer has his or her DVD player and TV properly set up.
Hollywood DVDs that have 4:3 and 16:9 versions contain two separately encoded versions of the film, usually on different sides of the DVD. Some films are released in two separate editions, one "widescreen" and one "fullscreen," with the fullscreen being a pan & scan version with the sides chopped off. I personally think they should call them "widescreen" and "butchered," but that's just me.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that the two main aspect ratios of U.S. films are 1.85:1 and 2.35:1, neither of which conform exactly to 16:9, which written a different way is 1.78:1. Thus, a 1.85:1 film shown full-frame on a 16:9 screen will have very small black bars above and below the image, and a 2:35:1 film will have larger black bars above and below the image.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Leland Davis on Apr 7, 2008 at 9:51:21 pm
Yeah, I had read that.
The problem here is that it's 4:3 footage that I'm trying to make look right on a 16:9 screen.
"if the DVD player is set to 4:3 when connected to a 16:9 television:
-4:3 material will be stretched horizontally
-16:9 anamorphic material will be displayed either as squashed vertically with black bars above and below or as horizontally stretched pan & scan 4:3
-letterboxed 4:3 material will be displayed stretched horizontally with black bars above and below."
Your post seems to be saying that any time a 4:3 DVD player is connected to a 16:9 TV there is going to be distortion unless you change settings in your TV. I have Hollywood version 4:3 movies that show fine in full screen on my 16:9 tv (there may be portions of the image cropped), while my 4:3 DVD looks stretched at the same settings. What did they do differently than I did? They say it was "formatted to fit my screen" in the message at the beginning of their video. What did they do? How do I do that to my DVD?
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Alan Okey on Apr 7, 2008 at 10:33:40 pm
[Leland Davis]"Your post seems to be saying that any time a 4:3 DVD player is connected to a 16:9 TV there is going to be distortion unless you change settings in your TV."
Exactly.
[Leland Davis]"I have Hollywood version 4:3 movies that show fine in full screen on my 16:9 tv (there may be portions of the image cropped), while my 4:3 DVD looks stretched at the same settings. What did they do differently than I did? They say it was "formatted to fit my screen" in the message at the beginning of their video. What did they do? How do I do that to my DVD?"
It's simply not possible that a 4:3 image could be displayed on a 16:9 screen in its entirety without distortion or cropping. The "formatted to fit your screen" usually refers to a pan & scan cut of a widescreen film, in which the sides are cut off. DVD players can't zoom into a 4:3 image and cut off the top & bottom to fit a 16:9 screen. If that's what is happening, then it's your TV that is doing it.
What is your TV's aspect ratio setting?
Some 16:9 TVs have a setting called "just," in which a nonlinear stretch is applied to a 4:3 image such that the center of the image has very little horizontal stretch but the edges are given an increasing amount of stretch as one goes further out from center. This spares any cropping of the image, and minimizes distortion in the center area of the screen. However, that wouldn't explain the apparent variation between your Hollywood and self-made DVDs.
I would first make sure that any kind of auto aspect ratio selection on your TV is turned off. Select 4:3 as the display aspect ratio and then compare your self-made 4:3 DVD with the Hollywood 4:3 DVD. They should appear identical, and there should be black bars on the sides of the image (pillarboxing). If the Hollywood DVD appears stretched vertically, then it's not 4:3.
The only way you can get your self-made 4:3 DVD to fill a 16:9 screen is to use zoom mode on the TV (which will result in the top and bottom of the image being cut off) or use the "just" mode described above, if your TV has that feature. Either method results in something less than ideal.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Leland Davis on Apr 8, 2008 at 1:14:55 am
I don't need the 4:3 video to fill the 16:9 screen, I just need it pillarboxed so it's not distorted.
It doesn't matter what settings my HDTV are on, they're the default ones that I'm sure most of the people who view this DVD will be using as well. I need a solution somewhere in the editing and authoring process to make the video look right on both 16:9 and 4:3 displays, not an after-the-fact resetting of the TV.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Alan Okey on Apr 8, 2008 at 7:26:48 am
Here's what you could do:
Create a Final Cut Pro sequence using a 16:9 anamorphic setup (presumably NTSC DV/DVCPRO).
Import your 4:3 footage to the project and place it on the timeline. Your 4:3 clips should appear "pillarboxed" on the 16:9 output.
When you compress your video for DVD, make sure you select a preset that is 16:9 anamorphic in order to make sure that DVD Studio Pro will interpret your footage correctly.
This is a decidedly non-standard workflow, and it has two problems:
1. You will see a 16:9 screen with pillarboxing on a computer monitor, whether the monitor is widescreen or 4:3. Thus, if you switch to fullscreen mode in the DVD playback software, there will be black borders around the entire image on a 4:3 monitor.
2. By putting a 4:3 clip in a 16:9 anamorphic timeline, you are losing horizontal resolution in the clip, as you are giving up pixels to the pillarboxing.
All standard definition DVD MPEG-2 footage is 720x480, regardless of whether it is 16:9 anamorphic or 4:3. The DVD aspect ratio flags and DVD player settings determine how the anamorphic footage is sent to the video outputs.
By pillarboxing your video, what you're attempting to do is to compensate for people's incorrectly set TVs, and in doing so you are compromising the quality of your footage.
If those people who have their 16:9 TVs set up to stretch 4:3 footage to fill the screen aren't bothered by the distortion, why are you worried about it? The easier thing to do is to have them set their TVs properly instead of trying to compensate for their ignorance.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Leland Davis on Apr 8, 2008 at 5:08:36 pm
I can't get thousands of retail customers who I don't know to reset their TVs. Even if I could go to the extra time and expense of having an insert printed and packaged with the DVD, there's no way that I'm going to be able to compile instructions for every TV set, and there's no way that I can simply say "go read your manual on how to set your TV aspect ratio." Are you kidding? End user customers will never figure that out.
The reason it's important is that if the image looks distorted when they pop the DVD in on their standard settings, they're not going to have a very positive view of my company or my product. I'd rather have slightly lower image quality and not have everything look short and fat.
I'm in the middle of a test with that 16:9 think in the timeline. I noticed the windowbox on the computer screen, but for some reason it didn't work on the HDTV. There's no pillarboxing there and the image still looks flattened.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Alan Okey on Apr 8, 2008 at 6:41:46 pm
[Leland Davis]"I can't get thousands of retail customers who I don't know to reset their TVs. Even if I could go to the extra time and expense of having an insert printed and packaged with the DVD, there's no way that I'm going to be able to compile instructions for every TV set, and there's no way that I can simply say "go read your manual on how to set your TV aspect ratio." Are you kidding? End user customers will never figure that out."
There's no magical setting in DVD Studio Pro or any other authoring application that can correct for improperly configured TVs. "Hollywood" 4:3 DVDs are just that - 4:3, no magic mojo involved. If you wish to degrade the quality of your product to accommodate a small subset of customers who don't know how to properly set their TV, so be it.
Trying to anticipate every wacky incorrect setting on the customer's TV set is a losing battle. It's the same with color correction - you can't magically create a DVD that will have perfectly correct color when played back on any TV. The best you can do is to calibrate to a known standard, and accept that you only have control over the image up to a certain point.
It sounds to me like your TV is set to some type of auto-aspect correction mode that tries to determine the aspect ratio of the signal by analyzing the image. If this is the case, you'll never see pillarboxing unless you turn off the auto-aspect setting on the TV.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Trai Forrester on Apr 9, 2008 at 7:31:44 am
You are thinking exactly correctly, Leland,
As I've stated many times over the years; The DVD format is a widescreen format. Period.
All 4:3 footage (and menus) should be composited into wide frames and set for 16:9 Pan and Scan. That way the 4:3 footage displays full screen on 4:3 TV's and pillar-boxed on widescreen displays.
Hope you get it sorted over there - make sure your wide FCP sequence is encoded to Mpeg 2 as 16:9 in Compressor, and when you import the stream into DVD SP and place it on the Track timeline, that you set your Track for 16:9 Pan and Scan - not 16:9 Pan and Scan and Letterbox, in the Track's properties.
Important; to make sure that the Pan and Scan settings stick in all players, it's best to first drop your Mpeg stream onto John Brisbin's "Force 16:9 Pan and Scan", before import into DVD SP. That will write the centering vectors into the Mpeg stream headers, itself. Although, in my 156 players, only one older player would letterbox the footage on a 4:3 TV, without the centering vectors present in the Mpeg stream, as the overwhelming majority of players go by the VTS (Track) Video Attribute settings for how to display the stream. So a lot of authoring studios I know go just with the Track settings (I'm known to be a little cautious when it comes to mass release, and thus recommend writing the Pan and Scan centering vectors in the stream, as a thorough buttoning-up of the DVD).
Take care,
Trai
--
Trai Forrester
TFDVD Research Labs
DVDVerification.com
Entering 10 years of full-time, professional DVD Studio Pro troubleshooting and support
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Leland Davis on Apr 9, 2008 at 1:46:27 pm
Thanks Trai!
What are your thoughts on the windowboxing issue on computer monitors? When I reformat the video into pillarboxed 16:9 and then play the DVD in a computer, it's windowboxed on a regular display. I know this would annoy me if I was an end user who wanted to watch this on a laptop.
Everywhere else it looks fine, including on my living room media computer with an HDTV as the display. Why would the same app (Apple DVD player) on my g4 ibook windowbox it while on my media mini (Intel) it knows to fill the HDTV screen with the 16:9 frame? Does Apple DVD Player read the resolution settings of the monitor and adjust accordingly?
I'm still not sure which video track I'm going to go with in the end. Right now I have a million menus to build, and some more tracks to edit so I have until Monday or so to decide.
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Freya Black on Apr 19, 2008 at 2:36:00 pm
Normal DVD discs are natively 4:3.
16:9 video is created anamorphically from the 4:3 video.
I will assume you are working in DV codec as you don't mention.
In Final Cut you need to start a project and make sure that the settings for the codec are for DV and not for DV widescreen. You need to be sure that your originating footage is also 4:3 and not anamorphic. When you come to export the footage you again want to export it as just DV.
Now you come to DVD studio Pro where everything is messy and confusing. Well at least for me as it was the first time I used it. Import your footage as an asset. It should appear as an asset at the bottom of the screen. BEFORE you do anything else, Control click on the video asset and select encoder settings. Here you want to select 4:3. NOW you can drag your asset over and make it into a track. Do this in the wrong order and it will all go wrong.
I actually had the same problem as you except that everything kept being 4:3 when it was supposed to be 16:9.
I hope this helps you solve your problem. There's obviously a few different stages where things can go funny, but I suspect that the problem will be in DVD studio. I could be wrong of course! :)
Re: Displaying 4:3 video on HDTV by Freya Black on Apr 19, 2008 at 3:02:32 pm
Bother! I forgot to say something important!
You need to set the aspect ratio in DVD studio Pro for both the asset and for the track.
So you need to do step 2 after what I have already decribed which is to click on the video track in a blank space next to an asset. (Don't click on the asset as that brings up details for that instead). To the right you should now see the General tab with the option DISPLAY MODE, you need to select 4:3 here as well.
According to the DVD Studio Pro manual, some DVD players look at the track settings for the aspect ratio and others look at the settings in the video itself.
