"Safe" Area

birdcat wrote on 1/29/2006, 4:23 AM
Hi All -

Too late for this project (delivering to airport this morning) bur for future use - Is there a quick way to shrink the amount of horizontal space used in building a video DVD?

I originally set up for 720x480 before I remembered the DVD player/TV would chop off the outside left and right 10% or so. I tried to set the project to 640X480 after the fact but when I burned using DVDA3 it made no difference. I also tried creating a new project using my original project as a nested VEG and zooming out using track motion on the video - this did work somewhat (added a border around the image), but when the text was scrolling (pan/zoom) in several places (but not all), it was very distorted.

So for next time, any suggestions?

Thanks.

Bruce

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/29/2006, 4:35 AM
I would use Pan/Crop to shrink the image. Track Motion can produce a lot of distortion but Pan/Crop seems to handle image resizing much more smoothly. It works the opposite of Track Motion in that you have to drag the dashed rectangle out larger in order to shrink the image. Once you've set the first event on the timeline copy it, then select all the rest of the events and use Past Event Attributes to copy the Pan/Crop settings to all of them.

If you have used Pan/Crop individually on some of the events and don't want to override their settings, you could render the whole project to a new .AVI file first, then start a new project with this new file and resize it with Pan/Crop as a single event. Then render the DVD from this project.

As you've noted though, this leaves a black border around the image. Since different televisions will all have different size safe areas you never know if you've got a wide enough border or if it will be too wide. A far better approach is to fill the frame completely with the video image but make sure anything important like titles and faces are away from the edges.
vicmilt wrote on 1/29/2006, 9:40 AM
Two things the professional cameraman always keeps in mind are Action Safety and Title Safety.

This has been complicated by virtue of now having to shoot not only for the truncated frame of TV (see below) but also for the full frame access of computer imagery; CD ROM and some of the newer LCD TV sets coupled with DVD playback.

In the bad old days (now) television tubes were subject to image size creep - as they got older, the picture tube would expand the image, cutting off the edges, up to 10% or more.

To combat this, we'd allow an Action Safety (shooting in 35mm film) which theoretically would encompass the entire image on TV (xferred from film) and then Title Safety which "guaranteed" that the clients written message would also appear - guaranteeing the cameraman another day of work for that client.

If you shot too tight for title safety or framed too high for "lower thirds" - you would generally have to find another client.
(same sort of issue if you shot with a very wide lens and forgot to take off the lens shade on the matte box - ending up with beautiful footage that looked like it was shot through a submarine porthole - yikes!)

Just a bit of history to keep this site from being ALL fun and useful information...

v
TheHappyFriar wrote on 1/29/2006, 12:12 PM
here's what I do: tape small pieces of thread over the preview LCD on my camera. That works good. :)
birdcat wrote on 1/30/2006, 4:58 AM
you could render the whole project to a new .AVI file first, then start a new project with this new file and resize it with Pan/Crop as a single event

Great idea - I should have thunk of that! Now I know for next time! Thanks!!!