Random Letterboxing of Media - Oops, my mistake

MartinAdams wrote on 6/30/2009, 1:31 AM
In Vegas MS 9 Plat, I now have hundreds of photos and video clips edited on the timeline, in a 2-hour movie. They were fine, or so I thought. Well, I went back to the source tapes, and I can't believe it - seven tapes are in widescreen, but they are stretched on the cam's LCD, so I didn't catch it, no black bars. Those 7 tapes are 80% of the movie, so I'm thinking to change the output format to widescreen, even though it will be low-res. The cam is only 720 x 480, so it will be 720 x something less than 400. Anyway, I'm obviously new to this program, so you can laugh all you want. I'm sure that when I get this project sorted out and finally on DVD, I will look back and chuckle. At the moment, I'm a bit concerned, because I'm not sure how to convert this movie to widescreen. I suppose just change the properties someplace, and the output format. I appreciate the kind help some of you gave on my last stumble. I started to render to .avi and saw the estimated size to be 28GB and I thought, oh crap, that will never fit on a DVD. Thanks to you who told me to render to .avi and DVD Architect will reduce it to fit the disc. Where do you learn all this stuff?

Comments

Ivan Lietaert wrote on 7/1/2009, 1:38 AM
Go for trial and error. I suggest you start with the standard mainconcept templates. Instead of rendering your full 2 hour movie, select 1 minute or so, and render this (which is much faster). Do some trials with 'do not letterbox' on and off. Carefully take note of all your settings, and then burn a re-writable dvd in DVDArchitect. Also look at the dvd menu. Try out the dvd on as many dvdplayers as possible, and then decide which settings you are happy with.
It is a bit tedious, going through this process of trial and error, but once you get it right, you can save these settings in presets, so from then on all will be fine.
musicvid10 wrote on 7/1/2009, 7:42 AM
First of all, let's get past some misconceptions.
NTSC SD 4:3 is 720x480.
NTSC SD 16:9 Widescreen is 720x480.
What you are not taking into account is the Pixel Aspect Ratio.

So, let''s expand a bit.
NTSC 4:3 is 720x480, .9091 PAR.
NTSC 16:9 Widescreen is 720x480, 1.2121 PAR.

PAR is a multiplication factor of the width. It tells you by what factor the pixels are stretched or squeezed horizontally to give you the correct Screen Aspect Ratio, in this case 4:3 or 16:9.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's go to two sets of Vegas Properties. The first is the Project Properties. You will always want to set the Project Properties the same as your Media Properties. To do this, you click the little "Folder" icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Project Properties box, and select one of your movie files. This makes everything display correctly on the Vegas Preview Screen.

Next, let's go to the Render or Make Movie Properties. In this case you would also choose a template that matches your media: Standard or Widescreen. This way, your output video will fill the output frame without black bars. If you put 4:3 video in a Widescreen template, you will get black bars on the sides. If you put Widescreen video in a 4:3 template, you will get black bars on the top and bottom.

There is also a checkbox to "Fill output frame." This does exactly what it says, but distorts the Media Aspect to match the SAR. You can also crop your Media Events to fit the Output Aspect but it is a somewhat tedious process, especially when trying to fit 4:3 to a 16:9 SAR.

Hope this gets you started, there are literally dozens of excellent tutorials around the web that will help you along the way. Good Luck!
Byron K wrote on 7/1/2009, 10:51 AM
Musicvid,
This is a great explanation (in laymans terms) how this works! I was cropping all my media events and yes it is a very tedious process. (;

Thanks!
MartinAdams wrote on 7/1/2009, 11:23 AM
Thank you, this is extremely useful. What I discovered by going back to my source tapes is that most were recorded in widescreen, and I never knew it, because the LCD stretches the media to fill it. Well, I started to resize all the other stuff to widescreen - about an hour to do 6 minutes of video - and gave up after 2 hours. I decided to go with 4:3 and leave the black bars top and bottom on a lot of scenes. No, it doesn't look great, but it's a how-to DVD, and the educational value is not diminished by the aesthetic, um, blunder. I managed to get it into DVD Architect, at least part of it. For some reason, it was chopped into six files, ignoring chapter markers, numbered 01, 02, 03... appended to my file names. Clicking on one in the Explorer window plays the file, and they are right in the middle of chapters! I'm grateful to have gotten this far without a PhD in editing, but this is really puzzling. Why would I get 6 files? Why are they randomly cut up? How am I going to create a menu structure with them? I'm going to study the Quick Start booklet, but I think there must be better documentation somewhere.