Unwanted Pillarboxing

VicViper wrote on 6/7/2008, 10:56 AM
Hi,

I'm trying to format a dvd so that the video is played black as anamorphic.

I'm new to attempting this, so as I understand it, an anamorphic dvd will have video that is displayed on a 4:3 set with bars on the top and bottom but fills the rest of the screen, and on an HD display (16:9) the black bars will be gone and the picture stretches to fill the rest of the screen. Correct?

The problem is, no matter how I try to format a DVD in architect 4.5(b) I can never get my video to display properly in both formats. I use a 720 X 480 video formated to 16:9 and I always end up will pillar boxing in addition to the bars on top and bottom. The menus will display properly though.

I've also tried rendering to anamorphic 2.0 before putting it into architect, but it doesn't format properly either. Maybe it's because Architect 4.5 doesn't recognize Quicktime anamorphic files, as the release says?

Anyway, any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Comments

bStro wrote on 6/7/2008, 12:13 PM
Why are you rendering to Quicktime to make a DVD? DVDs use MPEG2.

If you give DVD Architect a Quicktime file, it has to re-encode the video to MPEG2. That's probably the point at which it's turning your 16:9 video into 4:3. On the other hand, if your file is already DVD compliant (the first step of which is using MPEG2), DVDA won't mess with it all and you don't have to tell it what to do.

If you're rendering / encoding out of Vegas, choose MPEG2 for the type of file and use the DVD Architect widescreen video stream template. Then render your audio using PCM or Dolby Digital AC3.

If you're deadset on passing it a Quicktime file, go to File > Optimize and ensure that that video is set to be re-compressed to 16:9. The default is for anything needing re-encoding to be done at the Project default, and the usual Project default is 4:3.

Rob
MPM wrote on 6/7/2008, 3:27 PM
It’s *Very* possible to have the player &/or TV setup wrong to cause the pillar-boxing + letter-boxing you’ve described, so you might want to check that first.

Vegas will do 16:9 anamorphic mpg2 without a problem, unless you have things set up wrong... Use the 16:9 template as Rob posted, but then watch your preview during render, & test it out afterwards - If Vegas thinks you want to embed a 4:3 video in the middle of a 16:9 frame, it’ll be more than happy to oblige. If you’re encoding in DVDA, you can get into trouble with your settings also - you have default, project, & media settings plus whatever zoom/pan&scan options; if you import DVD-spec mpg2, the project settings refer more to your menus, which can be *Only* 4:3 or 16:9. Again, test... Import just a short clip and render a test DVD to your hdd & test. If everything’s cool, go on to burning a disc & test that on your player & wide-screen TV...

You mentioned anamorphic 2... Maybe it’ll help to set the ground rules?... DVD-spec Anamorphic mpg2 is wide-screen, 16:9 video that’s been resized to fit in a 720 X 480 frame - if you look at the 720 frame it’ll appear “off”, squeezed to appear tall & thin. Now there are other formats with software players that will work with whatever aspect ratio video - .wmv in Windows Media Player is a great example - so you can use something besides DVD-spec 16:9 anamorphic, but only on your PC, not on a DVD
VicViper wrote on 6/7/2008, 7:46 PM
Thanks for replying guys.

I followed both of your suggestions to the letter and still couldn't figure out why I kept ended up with pillar boxing. This has been driving me nuts for the past week.

Then I noticed the pixel aspect ratio was apparently defaulting to Square Pixels 1.0. My footage was NTSC Widescreen 1.21212. I corrected it and no more pillarboxing. I would've thought that DVDA would've automatically detected the settings, so it never even dawned on me.

Anyway, thanks for all your help!
MPM wrote on 6/8/2008, 7:11 AM
Glad you got it. :-)

Unfortunately with most video formats there's no standard way to note the PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio), & no standard place to store that data in the video file. DVD mpg2 is an exception, but then software has to know to act on it - you can play mpg2 in WMPlayer for example (assuming codecs installed), and it'll normally display it using square pixels. It gets pretty confusing...

DVDA only has a sub-set of Vegas' video handling features, which is why whenever possible it's recommended to have your video finished before DVDA ever sees it. I'm not sure what DVDA defaults to, but it's more-or-less std practice for software to default to square PAR if it thinks you're using a PC video format. It doesn't hurt to keep an eye on your field order either as you're processing your video.