Q: Aspect ratio when exporting to DVD

Woodlandliz wrote:

 

  Inevitably the output is skewed and the altered ratio means that there is lost image around the edges.

 

Hey Liz,

Not sure what you mean by skewed,  Are you in PAL land (what country)? If it's giving you a 576 output file, your video is presumably 25 frames per second (the PAL standard).

Assuming it is PAL, then the frame size is correct. FCP will export it as anamorphiic so it will display wide screen. But there is no getting around the fact that the resolution will be SD.

If your video is under 35 minutes, you could choose the Blu Ray preset and output it to your DVD optical drive, That will produce an AVCHD disk, which is far higher quality than DVD, but m\less than true Blu Ray. It should play in a Blu Ray player.

Best of luck.

Russ

I gave up on DVD a couple of years ago (when DVD Studio Pro was "abandoned"), so somebody else might have a better suggestion.

One of the problems with DVD is that it is always the same resolution: 720x480 (or 486).   16:9 playback is achieved by setting the Anamorphic flag which changes the aspect ratio and the resultant video is approximately 854 x 480 (in square pixels.)  If your DVD player is set up correctly, the Anamorphic version should play full screen on an HDTV set without letterboxing (or pillarboxing). You might also need to change your tv settings to play "Wide" and not "Normal" (there's usually a button on the remote to make that easy). So check your DVD again.

If changing your TV settings doesn't make a difference:

I would recommend duplicating your project (you will be downgrading resolution). Then, in the Info Inspector, click on the Modify Settings button. From the dialog, change the Video Properties to

NTSC SD  >  720x480 DV Anamorphic  >  29.97p (for a progressive disc.) 

As far as I can tell, you should not need to make any further modifications to the project (for example, resizing titles, etc...) Everything should fit.  Share to DVD should be a no-brainer from there.

HTH

Woodlandliz wrote:

 

 

On the Share -> DVD settings, the default setting which will determine how the DVD is burned (in the settings/information bar across the bottom of the screen) is the wrong aspect ratio at 720 x 576 i.e it is a different aspect ratio to the original file which is 16:9 (1980 x1080) and when produced the DVD is inevitably displaying in this 720 x 576 ratio and so is cutting off some of the original image around the edges.

 

Again, the DVD output will be SD (720X576), but it will be automatically flagged as anamorphic (re-sized to 16:9) if the original video setting is PAL 1080 (or 720). Specifically, that means it must be set to 25 frames per second. Are those the project settings?

I don't know why the AVCHD disk didn't play in your Blu Ray player. It should. However, they will never play in a DVD player.

Russ

Taht's really puzzzling. Could you export a short section of your video as a Master File and open in QuickTime – and post a screen shot of the Movie Inspector Report?

Here are some screen shots of a 1080 PAL video. I have chosen a slide show with 3:2 images to emphasize the circle shape and the rectangle that extends to nearly the width of the frame.

I then export as Share>DVD. Note the 720X576 frame size bottom left.

Here, I have opened the VOB file after export in VLC (DVD PLayer will not support a screen shot).

As you can see the circle shape is not distorted (so the anamorphic data was read correctly). Nor is anything cropped in display – since the entire rectangle is shown and the width of the black bars is unchanged.

Russ

Liz, I believe what you're running into is overscan, a display issue which is addressed in these two articles.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5841

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/

Agree it's annoying to have to deal with, but I think Fox_m and I both thought you were describing a more extreme case where the frame shape was not displayed as 16:9 because of the set's (or player's) failure to read the DVD as anamorphic.

BTW. if you open your project in FCP and click the Viewer Display oprtions, Overlays to display Action Safe, my guess is that what you see outside the overlays will represent approximately how much is being cropped.

So, as Fox_m first mentioned, one option is to have viewers who "notice" (hard to imagine those who would unless they had 2 versions to compare) adjust their sets; another is to re-scale your video.  Good luck with the project.

Russ

To make certain it will fit on every set you would need to rescale it to 90% before export. In other words, ensure that the entire image is contained within the Action Safe zone.

It's your call but if it were my video, I probably would not do that. Different TV's will vary somewhat in overscan amount and so it's very likely the viewer will see  aslightly letterboxed image. The irony is that the ones that are set up correctly will be the most affected; they will see the most black.

So it's really a question of trade-offs: whether you feel potential letterboxing for some viewers is better than the loss of content for others.

Russ

Here's another clip rescaled, exported as disk image with the VOB opened in MPEG Streamclip. In this case, I selected the entire timeline and created a compound clip. Then rescaled the clip to be (a little smaller than) Action Safe dimensions.

Russ