Comments

DataMeister wrote on 2/6/2004, 12:56 PM
Most DVD players are aware (via user setup) of the type of TV being used (widescreen or standard) and will automaticly letterbox a wide screen video for display on at standard TV.

JBJones
diggersf wrote on 2/7/2004, 7:10 PM
What about menus? I would rather not have the menu be letterboxed. How would I go about making the menu 4:6 and the actual video 16:9?

I finnaly broke down and used a precious dvd to test the wide screen video I rendered out of Vegas. The video looks great in dvd-a, but when I play it on a 4:6 tv it does not seem to be letterboxing enough. It does not letterbox to the extent of a proffesinal dvd and leave some of the edges cut off. Thanks for the reply.
farss wrote on 2/8/2004, 2:40 AM
The issue most likely is that the Hollywood DVD isn't 16:9. If it's of a movie that was shot 1.85:1 then they can do one of two thing. SLightly letterbox it (black bars top and bottom) so you don't loose bits at the edges or crop it to fit a 16:9 frame. Either way someone will complain!

The problem gets much worse with a cinemascope movie (2.1:1 AR). You see film formats were well entrenched before television came along, even the television system was never designed with widescreen in mind.
DataMeister wrote on 2/9/2004, 11:04 AM
Something else you might want to do is get a good quality DVD-RW disc so you can test your project over and over again without wasting a disc. Then burn to a DVD-R when you have what you want.

In reguards to having different format video and menus, DVD-A will allow you to manually set the format for each item on the disc. Under the File>Optimize DVD... menu you can change video and audio in the bottom sections. Normally DVD-A does a good job picking what you need, but occassionaly you might want to override things.

JBJones