V13 -- Question regarding rendering for DVD

Curt wrote on 1/19/2015, 7:47 PM
I'm putting a DVD together and had a question as to the best render template to use. The source material is primarily home movies transferred from Super-8mm film, with the occasional piece of VHS video.

In order to clean up the edges of the film frame, I cropped the frame. Had to do that on some of the video footage as well because of some tearing action going on at the top of the frame.

Anyway, since my target audience (family) all have widescreen flat-panel TV's, is there any benefit to rendering the final MPEG videos as NTSC Widescreen? Should I just stick to the old 4:3 NTSC DVD stream and hope their players/TV's don't make everyone look like Charlie Brown?

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 1/19/2015, 7:52 PM
I'd suggest keeping it 4:3 like the original source. Let them be the ones who make it look like junk, not you. :) Or, put it in a 16:9 project and put the black bars in yourself, then it can't be messed up.

Just make sure you're not resizing the video when you crop, you're just cropping. If you resize it then you'll mess up the interlace and it could look bad.
musicvid10 wrote on 1/19/2015, 8:02 PM
Leave it the way it is. Check the playback on your set first.
videoITguy wrote on 1/19/2015, 8:49 PM
Your best most compatible end use results will be if you center the 4:3 aspect ratio frame inside the 16:9 widescreen format. For the very reason you allude to in your opening post. Good call. With the crop - you will get about 70% of the widescreen to be directly used to show quality of your original..again a very good call.
Curt wrote on 1/20/2015, 6:16 AM
Although the source material is 8mm film (in the neighborhood of 4:3), the camera used to capture the footage was HD 16:9, so the video format in the Vegas session is 16:9.

As for the old VHS stuff, that's all "bonus material." Those clips are stand-alone, so I'm sticking with 4:3 for that.