Large black bands at top and bottom of screen

jimsvideo wrote on 8/26/2009, 8:13 PM
I have a Sony HDR-HC7 HDV 1080i Mini DV camera. I use Sony Vegas Pro 8 and DVD Pro Architect 5.0.

At present, whenever I play my DVD video on a Sony 16:9 40 inch LCD TV, there are quite large black bands at the top and bottom of the screen.

Can anyone tell me please what settings I need to use in Vegas 8 and Architect 5 so that the final output fills the screen. I have a PAL TV, and I have tried several different settings, but I always get these black bands. This doesn't happen with other DVDs that I play on my video players.

Thanks very much for your help.

Jim

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 8/26/2009, 8:41 PM
When rendering to MPEG 2, make sure you check "Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox)"
farss wrote on 8/26/2009, 11:04 PM
Make certain your project is 16:9 and that you render to a 16:9 / Widescreen template.
Then in DVDA make certain that you author a Widescreen DVD.

Certainly no problems here making a 16:9 PAL DVD from our HC7.
The only problem we do have is kind of the opposite. The TV does not recognise the video as being 16:9 so I have to manually force the TV into 16:9.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 8/26/2009, 11:15 PM
Yeah, and I got a personal DVD player that stretches 4:3 to 16:9 - no problem. Maybe we should send both our monitors out on a date together?

Grazie
jimsvideo wrote on 8/27/2009, 2:45 AM
Thanks very much for your replies, it’s been a long while since I did any video editing, so I appreciate your patience! Ticking the box “stretch video to fill output frame size” was certainly necessary, thanks Peter for this.

I have tried out a small test project in Vegas 8 using the HDV 1080-50i (1440 x 1080) 25.000 fps template, with full resolution set at “best”. When rendering this file, I used MPEG-2 HDV 1080-50i, and this produced a .m2t file of approximately the same size as the original (about 150mb).

I did this because I wanted a high resolution edited file to play back on my computer. But, when I loaded this .m2t file into DVD Architect, I set the project properties to MPEG-2 with a PAL resolution of 720 x 576, 16:9 aspect ratio, and a bit rate of 8.5 Mbps. This produced an estimated project size of 50.8mb, so naturally the HD video was substantially compressed to meet the 720 x 576 PAL resolution setting.

Overall, the result was quite good with the video filling the whole of the 16:9 screen. I guess there are lots of other ways of achieving this result, but I don’t think there is too much wrong with this approach?

Regards
Jim