. . . additionally:

"PAL which stands for Phase Alternating Line is one of the television formats used in Europe. It has a pixel aspect ratio of 576 vertical lines and 720 horizontal lines. This means there are 288 vertical scanned lines and 360 horizontal scanned lines, with a display frame rate of 25 frames per sec at 50Hz. Colour subcarrier of 4.433618, horizontal frequency of 15.625 Khz, vertical frequency of 50 Hz, video bandwidth of 5.0 Mhz, and an audio bandwidth of 5.5 Mhz FM."

So, any further comments?

As I said in my previous post, I've been using the SoFo PAL template and it fills both the Preview screen and when I finally show my projects on 4:3 PAL screens.

Grazie

Grazie,
Everything I've ever seen on PAL is 720x576, even FCP agrees on that.
I think the other number you mentioned may relate to the total equivalent number of pixels that corresponds to a full line in the analogue domain. This is where things can get really confudding. Also when you bring analgue into DV it doesn't fill the whole line, some margin has to be left for jitter in the horizonatla blanking period.

I see this when I capture from VHS. Tapes recorded on different machines have different blanking periods so the image is in different places across the screen. Also the amount of jitter varies from machine to machine.

farss you are absolutely correct! Now I understand the tiny bit of "rubbish" I get at the bottom of analogue>DV in my 720x576 screen. Could this be it?

Grazie

Interesting...as I also have noticed a line of "garbage" on my captured PAL DV footage.Another discrepency that has confused me in the past, has been the ratio for PAL Widescreen. Most ppl use 1.422 , whereas Vegas has 1.4568 as its default....I figure that if you use Vegas for editing, then you may as well stick to its defaults. Just gets confusing if you are jumping between apps...like AE to Vegas and back.

There have been other detailed postings on this, here or elsewhere.

To paraphrase, the good news was that the Vegas proportions were correct.

The bad news was that no-one else, including After Effects, seemed to use the correct formula.

Not sure how it all washes up, though - I just keep on editing.

Grazie,
depends where you coming from, if its from VHS you can get a few line near the bottom that are 'teared' due to head switching in the VCR, you don't see this on a TV as its normally masked off. The worse problem is the jittery blank space at the ends of the scan lines.

If you then render out to say VBR mpeg2 for DVD the encoder will see it as a lot of motion and use up a lot of bandwith encoding it. I always use TMPGEnc in this situation as it lets me easily put a clean mask over it. You can do the same in VV, but that adds render time whereas in TMPGEnc it seems to have no impact on encoding times.

The experts claim if you're very serious about getting it right then the edges of the masks should be aligned to the edges of the quantizing matrix. This stops the level change at the edge of the mask from again using up so much bandwidth. Thats all a bit too much trouble for me, after all I was only given off air VHS to start with!