some brush up questions

gmes29 wrote on 2/17/2012, 5:24 PM
been a while since i used VMS on a continued basis so since i'm seeing some weird stuff in my new project, figured i might as well brush up on it now. here's some background..
i just upgraded to VMS HD Platinum v11 from v8 for the sole purpose of doing this project which uses a DVR recording of an HD program (broadcast on HD channel). i was able to copy the program onto a DVD simply by attaching a standard RWY a/v cable from an output on my set top box to the input of my DVD recorder, playing the program back at the same i press Record on the recorder then let recorder do the rest. it basically recorded the program in real time while it played back. i then imported the 'chapters' onto my hard drive as mpg's so i now had a working copy of the video.
so anyway, when i placed the video on the timeline, i noticed some things i never saw before. the first was that the video was letterboxed in the preview window where nothing i did with the project settings changed that and the second was the fact that the video showed very few stills throughout the timeline.
letterboxing - when i try putting in text or video overlays, they use the entire preview window - including the bars at the top and bottom - but this doesn't look good when the overlay is displayed on top of the regular video since they seem to be using 2 different aspect ratios. i'd much rather have the overlays use only the area in which the video displays but i can't figure out how. i tried changing the video properties (widescreen, etc) but nothing worked. the video stubbornly stays in letterbox format.
stills - in v8, my videos would display stills quite frequently throughout the timeline no matter what the zoom level was but now in 11, there's hardly any which sucks in the event i want to do something like remove commercials. the more stills, the easier it is to determine the approximate starting point of a commercial but that's not possible the way it is displaying right now.
why are these things happening in 11 but not in 8? could it have something to do with the fact that i used an analog method of copying the original video recorded in HD onto a standard blank DVD+R?

disclaimer.. i don't believe i am doing anything illegal here. the program was already broadcast over free TV and i'm making this DVD for my own personal use. no money is involved.

Comments

MSmart wrote on 2/17/2012, 8:06 PM
This will answer your thumbnail (stills) question:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=12&MessageID=796527

The letter boxing could be encoded in your video which would explain why you can't get rid of them.
gmes29 wrote on 2/17/2012, 8:33 PM
thanx for the link. worked like a champ.

do you think that the letterbox encoding could have something to do with the fact that the video was originally recorded in HD then copied as SD?
MSmart wrote on 2/17/2012, 9:39 PM
Yes, more than likely. Check the settings on your DVD recorder, there may be a setting to eliminate them. Such as zooming. You'll loose a little on the sides but it should get ride of the top/bottom black bars.

If not, your only option is to crop the video in VMS using track Pan/Crop. But then your encoding it another time and could loose some PQ.