Safe Area Question

AdamB wrote on 4/9/2002, 8:42 PM
Hi there.
I'm in the middle or archiving some footage that I taped off TV with the idea to burn it to DVD later on when I get a DVD burner.

I can output the DVD complient MPEG2 footage to my TV two ways:
1) Through my ATI AIW and it looks fine. No Safe Area issues.
2) Through my Hollywood Magic DVD decoder card. The Safe Area is very, very Bad. It drives me nuts to watch it.

My question is....will the "Safe Area" that I loose be large when the final burnt DVD disk is played through a normal DVD player?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

Cheesehole wrote on 4/10/2002, 9:31 AM
>>>1) Through my ATI AIW and it looks fine. No Safe Area issues.
>>>2) Through my Hollywood Magic DVD decoder card. The Safe Area is very, very Bad. It drives me nuts to watch it.

the area that you lose is determined by the TV or video monitor that you view it on. if you are viewing this footage on the same monitor, and you are seeing two different size images, then something is cropping and resizing your video. is this what you are seeing?
Chienworks wrote on 4/10/2002, 1:53 PM
The ATI card shrinks the image that is sent out the analog video port. Actually it tends to shrink it vertically a lot more than horizontally. I don't have the Hollywood card, but i believe the Creative card uses the same chipset. This card doesn't seem to shrink the image at all. I would count on the worst. Some monitors cut off up to 20% of the image. Just make sure that what you really need to see falls inside the safe area.

If you really need to, you can use Vegas' Pan/Crop tool to perform a "negative" crop, which will shrink the image and have it take up a smaller area of the frame. The problem with this is that some monitors may end up showing the black border around the outside edge. It might be worth it if you want to make sure that the entire image is viewable.
AdamB wrote on 4/10/2002, 11:52 PM
Ya, i looks like Hollywood card is zooming the image but the ATI is not. I produced a VCD and tried to play it back trough the Hollywood card and had the same result. I'm going to try on my friend Toshiba DVD player and see how it looks and let you guys know.

Thanks for the info.
AdamB wrote on 4/11/2002, 11:58 PM
I tried the VCD I made on my friend's Toshiba DVD player and the Safe mode was still bad.
I don't get it. Why can I capture the whole frame and when I put it back to TV do I loose some much to the safe area?
AdamB wrote on 4/12/2002, 12:17 AM
Hey everyone. I've been rendering all the video using the NTSC DVD template with aspect ratio 4:3...I changed it to "square pixels and the safe area was really issue was really reduced. My screen doesn't look distored either. Everything looks great.

I guess my new question is why did that fix it. The default project settings say that the pixel ratio is 0.9091.