Black Border in Preview Window

rtimesr wrote on 12/3/2005, 4:09 PM

I was told VMS takes care of all still photo sizing... "just drag the photos to the time line and VMS will take care of everything". I did that and I have black margins at the top and bottom OR both sides of all stills in the preview frame. With the preview set to its max size (about 4x3 inches) a 1600x1200 pixel photo has black side edges about .040 wide. On a 1200x909 photo the side strips double in width to about .09 inches. A 1693x1144 (1.48 aspect ratio) still, as well as a 1731x1155 (1.50), and 1692x1164 (1.454) still have a .12 black border top and bottom. Most disturbing is a 800x600 (1.333) that has this same .12 top and bottom black border. If it all goes away with a 720x486 project window, no problem, but at this point I am worried by what the preview window is displaying. Should I resize all stills to 1600x1200 in PSP while converting from .jpg to .png? This is a 40 minute show so I want to render it right the first time. Thanks for all comments.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/3/2005, 5:34 PM

The problem you have is that the video frame is not 4:3, it's just slightly wider, 4.13333:3. Your stills would have to be 1600x1173 to match the 720x480 frame. Note that while Vegas takes care of correctly fitting your photos into the frame, it does not automatically fill the frame. Still photos come in many various shapes and sizes, including 4:3 which doesn't match the video frame. Rather than try to make a perfect match and possibly crop out parts of the picture that you don't want to lose, Vegas merely makes sure the entire picture fits inside the frame by reducing the largest dimension to fit, leaving empty space around a pair of edges as necessary.

If you open up Pan/Crop on each photo, right mouse button click* in the cropping window, and choose "match output aspect" from the popup menu then Vegas will crop so that the smallest dimension fills the frame with parts of the picture ending up ouside the frame. This makes sure the entire frame is filled at the expense of losing some of the picture. You can adjust the crop up or down or left or right as necessary in case you lose an important part of the picture.

Another alternative, if you are going for a show to be displayed on a computer screen rather than videotape or DVD to a television, is to set your project properties to match your photos. If you set the project to be 640x480 (or 800x600) with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0 then the frame will be 4:3 and 1600x1200 pictures will fill it exactly. Pictures of other shapes will still have to be adjusted.

* I know this feature is available in Vegas Studio 6, and i think it's in 4 as well. I don't know about older versions. However, you can manually crop if the menu option isn't there.

Tim L wrote on 12/3/2005, 8:15 PM

Chienworks is right (of course). The basic problem is that the shape of your photos is not quite the same shape as the shape of your DV video "screen" .

You have to decide whether you want fill the screen by expanding the photo, which results in some of the photo going off the edge of the screen, or if you want the entire photo to fit *inside* the screen, which means black bars on top and bottom, or left and right.

However, as Kelly alluded, you really need to consider where your final output is going to be viewed. If this is going to end up on a DVD, viewed on a normal TV screen, you will end up losing a good bit of the photo all the way around. Enable the "safe areas" grid in your preview window. On my (ancient) 27" TV, the outer line seems to be a very accurate representation of what shows up on the TV screen.

That is, the outer edge of the 720x480 image you see in the VMS preview window is actually *off* the edges of the screen of a normal TV. (I don't know if this is true on newer TV's, or Plasma screens, etc.) I generally leave the black bars on the top and bottom of the photos, and I don't think its very obvious. In some cases, if there is something very near the right or left edge of the photo, I use the crop (zoom) feature to zoom out a little and put black bars all the way around, so that the entire photo fits within the "safe area". This is the only way to be sure it will all show up on a normal TV screen.

It might be worth making a little test project with just a few photos, rendering it, and then viewing it the way you will your final result (i.e. make a DVD & view on a TV?) This might help you decide what approach you want to take.

Tim L

By the way, can anyone answer this question for me: do newer TVs, like plasma TV's, DLP, etc, have a similar "overscan" area? Or do they show the full 720x480 image, like a computer screen does?

rondi wrote on 12/4/2005, 9:46 AM

Tim L--surf over here and do a search for "overscan". there are a number of hits which suggest there is overscan setting for flat panel displays. i just read a few hits, but folks use the overscan to eliminate the "noise" at the top of the pix. this is not "noise" but maybe closed caption or other signals the broadcaster transmits...

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=40

hth

Tim L wrote on 12/4/2005, 12:13 PM

rondi -- thanks for the link.

I did a little bit of poking around there and found out, as you indicated, that high-end plasma TV's and projection TV's, etc., generally let you specify how much or how little overscan you want (through a setup menu).

You can set overscan to 0% and see everthing there is on some channels or sources, but you risk seeing "junk" and noise on some other sources, because the producers of that material counted on it being offscreen, in the overscan area of a regular TV.

Also, you can set overscan to 3 or 4% or so and lose the noise, but also risk losing some items (channel logos, sports scores, etc.) in HD broadcasts where the producers might have figured that anyone with an HD screen would have it set to 0% overscan.

Tim L