Windowboxing Movies for Playback on 4:3 TVs

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Windowboxing Movies for Playback on 4:3 TVs

I have two computers that I was using iDVD on. On both computers, I made a 640x480 movie in iMovie that when I view in QuickTime, the movie fills the frame to all corners with no letterbox, pillowbox or windowbox. On the first computer, I dropped that movie onto iDVD and then when I previewed it in iDVD it windowboxed my movie. That basically creates a black frame around the entire movie. Then when I watched that movie on my 4:3 TV, it fit in the frame perfectly and chopped off nothing on my TV. On the second computer I did the exact same thing except that it did not windowbox the movie. Now when I watch that movie on my 4:3 TV, the iMovie titles at the bottom get chopped off. So, I like the windowbox effect and want to repeat it. Except that for the life of me, I can not get it to repeat. Even with the exact same iDVD file that did it in the first place with the exact same movie file. In both cases, I exported the movie from iMovie using QuickTime instead of MediaBrowser. But I have also tried exporting as 720x540 in addition to the 640x480 with no luck.

Message was edited by: caveman664

iMac & G5, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Sep 23, 2007 11:28 AM

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Answer 1

F Shippey

Level 7

21,500 points

Sep 23, 2007 11:51 AM in response to caveman664

If you create a 4:3 aspect ratio DVD - that is what you have created - there is no letterboxing or any other kind of 'boxing' involved in iDVD.

The way the DVD is PLAYED BACK is a function of your DVD player software (on a computer) of the way you have set up your set top DVD player.

In general, CRT based TV sets will cut off content around the edge of an image because of overscan. (Overscan is necessary to hide the various sync pulses necessary for analog TV signals.) When you play a DVD on a computer monitor, there is no 'overscan' to contend with and you will usually see everything.

If you want to shrink your video so that everything shows on a TV set, you wil need to do something like this: http://homepage.mac.com/profpixel/QT_Pro_7xmasking.html

F Shippey

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Answer 2

caveman664 Author

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Sep 24, 2007 6:16 PM in response to F Shippey

Thank you F Shippey for the ideas.The funny thing is that the windowboxed playback occurs within the preview function of iDVD and when I view the burned disk on my Mac. However, it does not windowbox while viewing the original QuickTime file that iDVD is linking to. I guess it does show as perfectly windowboxed while viewing the burned disk on the TV (actually eerily perfect). The video shows up perfectly and I can't even see the black edge when I watch on TV. I have tested the burned disk on only one TV/DVD setup. I am going to try another TV test on a different TV/DVD setup. I will also try the masking function you linked to since that does seem to be the ultimate goal after all. I will repost next time I get results.

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Answer 3

caveman664 Author

Level 1

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Sep 30, 2007 11:33 AM in response to caveman664

After some testing, I can not figure out what I did on the original movie. I can only assume user error of some type. But it doesn't matter. The instructions you provided for creating the windowbox effect were perfect. In my case I just saved over the original file and the quality was far better than the DV output. I thought I would let iDVD do the recording. Thank you for you help.

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