Vertical Black Bars on Capture
by Scott Osborn
on
May 17, 2008 at 2:34:50 am
Searched and Googled, poked and prodded, and can't seem to find a situation similar to mine. Time to turn to you big-brained folks for help.
Working on a project where one day's footage was captured to BETA tape (the rest to miniDV). This BETA tape was then converted to miniDV by a dubbing house.
This is a DV NTSC project (720x480, 29.97 fps), and I digitized all tapes via Premiere's normal capture method, using a consumer-grade camcorder.
You see where this is going: Every tape was fine, with the exception of the BETA-sourced, dubbed tape. This particular tape, when played back using Premiere's capture utility, shows thin black vertical bars on both sides of the screen.
If I go ahead and capture the video, the resulting AVIs have the thin bars. Creating new projects with different settings (PAL, 24p, square pixels, etc.) has not made any difference.
NOTICE that this isn't a case where we've shot widescreen or are converting between 16:9 and 4:3.
Re: Vertical Black Bars on Capture by Jon Barrie on May 17, 2008 at 4:17:04 am
The Beta has been dumped onto the miniDV tape as 4x3 inside a 16x9 Anamorphic signal therefore making pillar box. If you told this clip to be widscreen Aspect Ratio it will look right, but you've lost a lot of information in the incorrect aspect ratio.
- Jon ;)
How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?
www.jonbarrie.net
Re: Vertical Black Bars on Capture by Scott Osborn on May 17, 2008 at 3:10:17 pm
Mike,
Thanks for the help. I took this step (changing aspect ratio to 1.2) and the footage became all stretched out. I then rescaled it (width only) to %77 and the results look pretty good. Still though, can't help but feel there's a better answer.
Re: Vertical Black Bars on Capture by Scott Osborn on May 17, 2008 at 3:07:40 pm
Jon,
First, thanks for the help.
> The Beta has been dumped onto the miniDV tape as 4x3
> inside a 16x9 Anamorphic signal therefore making pillar
> box.
Ah. This step was done by a local (Austin) dup house. Would you call this an error on their part, or is this considered normal?
> If you told this clip to be widscreen Aspect Ratio
> it will look right, but you've lost a lot of information
> in the incorrect aspect ratio.
Thanks. Did that step, now it looks all stretched out. If I then scale it down %77 (width only), the bars are gone and the image looks pretty clean. Still tho, I would hope there would be a better solution...
Re: Vertical Black Bars on Capture by Jeff Brown on May 19, 2008 at 3:38:59 pm
If you were seeing thin black bars (about 10 pixels wide, maybe?), you are seeing what analog video looks like. It is not full-raster wide compared to DV. That's just the way BetaCam is. (and VHS, for that matter). If you are outputting for the web, the best solution is to crop when you do the compression. If you are outputting for DVD or broadcast, don't do anything-- TVs are made to overscan the image slightly.
In my biased opinion, it is better not to scale analog video for your edit. It's low-res enough to begin with.
Re: Vertical Black Bars on Capture by Scott Osborn on May 20, 2008 at 2:52:58 am
Jeff,
Thanks for the input.
> If you were seeing thin black bars
> (about 10 pixels wide, maybe?),
Yes, that's about right: If I scale the footage, as-is, by 102% (width only), then they get sized off-screen.
> In my biased opinion, it is better not to scale
> analog video for your edit. It's low-res enough to
> begin with.
Thanks, gotta agree with you.
