Law and Disorder

ArmyVideo wrote on 9/27/2003, 8:19 AM
I'm working on a video of my kids for our family (we live in DC, everyone else is around the country). I re-did the Law and Order opener and was very jappy with the results. However, when I render it out, some of the images are now letterboxed, and some aren't. They don't appear that way in the prieview, and I made sure the 'stretch video to frame size' box was checked.

Any suggestions?
I posted an .rm version @ www.heritagemultimedia.net/LawAndOrder.rm

Comments

AZEdit wrote on 9/27/2003, 9:53 AM
Army,
Use the "Event Pan/Crop" - 4:3 Standard TV aspect ratio template and your 16 x 9 images will be the same as the rest. The preview window should have shown this ?? I have noticed when you "digitize" 16 x 9 images they appear as 4x3 at the time you capture- but after that- your display should let you see the 16 x 9 images. At what point and where did you apply the filter to stretch video to fill the frame?
ArmyVideo wrote on 9/27/2003, 1:45 PM
I appled the stretch to fill frame during render. All my images were 4:3 on the time line, that's why I was confused by the letterbox effects.
AZEdit wrote on 9/27/2003, 4:22 PM
Were some of your source files larger than 720 x 486 (or 480) ???
or were they all captured DV files?
kameronj wrote on 9/27/2003, 4:47 PM
I would like to see what you are talking about (we love two shows in our part of the world..."Stargate SG-1" and "Law and Order"). So just the thought of redoing the opener is interesting.

But, from the looks of your link, the file is real media?

Unfortunately, we don't take too kindly to real media in these parts!! (esoteric South Park reference...)

Do you happen to have the file in a different format? MPEG, WMV?

Or even a still JPEG?
ArmyVideo wrote on 9/27/2003, 5:30 PM
AZEdit - All were stills of varying resolutions and sizes. There was a lot of panning and croping to match the motions of the original intro.

Speaking of which, kameronj, I uploaded a wmv version just for you... it's www.heritagemultimedia.net/LawAndOrder.wmv. I avoided that format to begin with because it seems to pixelate more than Real Player at the same bitrate (512). When you view it, if you shrink the window a bit it will look cleaner.
kameronj wrote on 9/27/2003, 6:01 PM
Cool!!

Thanks....I'll check it out right now!!!
kameronj wrote on 9/27/2003, 6:11 PM
Okay....that was sweet!!!

That looked very professionally done and I like the concept. But then again - I"m just very partial to all the Law and Order series.

Great job.

I see what you mean about some of the images being letterboxed and some not. I'm assuming you didn't want the images letter boxed?

Off hand, if it looked alright in the preview - then I would want to focus on the render settings. I know there is the second to last box that say "do not letter box" - but that's the only one that jumps out at me.

I think I may try and recreate the intro too - should be fun.

All of the images should come in full screen - right?
ArmyVideo wrote on 9/27/2003, 6:46 PM
Thanks.. the only really hard part was finding the font, and doing the last bit where Law flys in from one side, Order from the other, and then the screen splits from the center.. Once I figured that out, it was pretty smooth. The easiest way I found to lay it out was to bring in the actual intro, then I replaced shots one by one with my own.

I did all the CG work in PhotoShop.

If you need the font (Friz Quadrata) I'd be happy to share it with you. It also comes free with Adobe PageMaker.