"Fat" people in 16:9.

farss wrote on 8/23/2010, 12:55 AM

This one has me stumped. Shot a performance as per usual with my EX1, edited and rendered to SD 16:9 and authored a 16:9 DVD.
Checked on my 16:9 TV and it's just fine, once I tell the TV it is 16:9!

Sent the DVDs off to the client and they come back to me and say it's great except the people are "big". Argh, I suspect they mean tall and skinny but No, I'm told they're fat and short!

I'm bewildered because I cannot fathom how one can mess up a DVD player or TV to get that outcome. Until I see it for myself I know I'm grasping at straws trying to resolve this by email but it's a long drive to ther place so if anyone has any clues much appreciated.

I should mention the only thing that I do that would perhaps make people appear short and fat is I set the Maintain Aspect Ratio, Do Not Letterbox flag which will stretch the image a tiny amount. No one has ever noticed this and I seriously doubt these people are that critical so I'm really stumped.

Bob.

Comments

ushere wrote on 8/23/2010, 1:05 AM

wild guess, but does their remote control have an 'aspect' shift? i have on both my 2 remotes for lcd sets, along with one on my dvd player.

perhaps, consciously or not, they pressed one of them - i can get 'fat' people on my bravia with one of the 'views'........

leslie

PeterWright wrote on 8/23/2010, 1:06 AM

Yes, that's a mystery when it's already widescreen Bob.

Would they perhaps have an alternative way of playing it - another player or a PC.
This wouldn't solve the problem, but help to isolate that it's something to do with either their player settings or their TV settings.

megabit wrote on 8/23/2010, 1:33 AM

I don't know if they are THAT critical, but do you remember my problems when down-rezzing my Dylla DVD? The solution was to change the original HD track size to 1971:1108.50 before downconversion....

Malcolm D wrote on 8/23/2010, 3:23 AM

Do they have a 16:9 TV?
If so are you sure they have not got their DVD player set for 4:3 TV?
Malcolm

farss wrote on 8/23/2010, 3:41 AM

Thanks everyone..
Yes, I do remember your problems but this is a freebie and the client asked if I could "refocus the camera to fix the problem" :)

I just tried doing it absolutely correctly. Nested a HD project into a 16:9 SD project and using Event Pan/Crop made it match exactly. I get 1920 x 1054.4 for the crop which would seem to mean the error would have been around 2.3% without it. I doubt too many would notice that tiny error.

Anyways I'll try and get some more information out of the client and if all else fails take a drive later in the week.

Bob.

farss wrote on 8/23/2010, 3:50 AM

Malcolm,
that's one possibility however if you do that then the 16:9 frame is sent out of the player letterboxed into 4:3 and...
You might have something here because the TV would stretch that out to 16:9 and I think you'd get the fat people.

I'll have to test this but you really may have nailed.

Bob.

farss wrote on 8/24/2010, 12:53 AM

" your TV should autoswitch to 16:9 if the video is 16:9."

No, it does not work that way. This was the subject of a discussion quite a while ago. The widescreen flags set when the DVD is authored only tell the DVD player that it is 16:9.

The TV may or may not look at signalling in the video sent to it to tell it if the content is 16:9 or 4:3. Precisely how this works over composite video is a bit of a mystery. I have done some tests that show that Hollywood DVDs do send the flag and nothing authored by DVDA does hence the need for me to grab the remote. I have aslo found some TVs get it reliably wrong and always display 4:3 as 16:9 and 16:9 as 4:3 again requiring manual intervention.
I'd sure like to get this sorted as well but I have no clue as to where to investigate further. There is provision for Active Format Description in mpeg-2 however as far as I can find out this is only officially used in DVB broadcasting. There's info on AFD here.

Bob.

Avanti wrote on 8/24/2010, 10:17 AM

Ask the client to play it on a computer and see.