How to avoid stretching 4:3 DV material on DVD?
by Dr Studen
on
Oct 31, 2009 at 11:54:00 pm
We are trying to achieve the best of both worlds w/4:3 DV material authored in DVDSP. I thought there was a way to author the DVD in such a way that the 4:3 displays correctly (fullscreen) on a 4:3 screen, AND that the same appears letterboxed (side bars) on a 16:9 screen (no stretching). Seems that it involved tweaking the 4:3 edit in FCP, then exporting in a different way, then bringing the edited data into DVDSP. Am I dreaming?
Many many thanks!
Re: How to avoid stretching 4:3 DV material on DVD? by Michael Sacci on Nov 1, 2009 at 2:52:20 am
[Dr Studen]"letterboxed (side bars) on a 16:9"
The is not "letterboxed" it is "pill-boxed"
There is nothing that you need to (or should) do with 4:3 video, the problem is that the 16:9 TVs themselves can be set to handle 4:3 video differently. There is nothing you can do to deal with this. If your video is 4:3, you encode it as such, in DVDSP the video track is 4:3, and it is done.
Re: How to avoid stretching 4:3 DV material on DVD? by Alex Asp on Nov 1, 2009 at 6:11:17 am
Actually you can pre-process your video so the 4:3 image is pillarboxed inside 16:9 frame(this is what Warner Bros done for Blu-ray releases of Casablanca, The Wozard of Oz and Gone with the Wind). You then encode the video as 16:9, preferably setting Pan&Scan flag in encoding (Cinemacraft MP will let you do it) and then when authoring in DVD SP you set track presentation as 16:9 and Pan&Scan.
In most cases you will get the best of both worlds
Re: How to avoid stretching 4:3 DV material on DVD? by Michael Sacci on Nov 1, 2009 at 6:30:23 am
My response is "let them eat cake"
If they don't know how to set up there TV/DVD player correctly who cares what they get.
But when you do this in SD you are degrading the image for people on a 4:3 TV since the Pan and Scan is a distortion up (vs with letterboxing the distortion is down) but this also add another process that you have to do. And there are a lot of people that don't want there big old 16:9 TVs to have black bars on the side so they intentionally stretch the image to fill the screen, by TV has 3 different methods of doing this.
I think HD is a different story and can understand why they did it for those but I think it is a waste of effort to do it on SD but to each their own.
Re: How to avoid stretching 4:3 DV material on DVD? by Alex Asp on Nov 2, 2009 at 6:41:26 pm
I also agree with that statement for newly shot material, but what are you going to do with the stuff that was made before 16:9 was invented?
I recently said to a client that he should shot his productions in HD. (t arrived later in Israel than in the rest of the globe). His answer was : Why? They don't broadcast HD here. And I was so pissed that I said to him: because in a couple of years time your programs would look like crap when they do switch to broadcasting HD.
