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Should I render in anamorphic 16:9 for DVDs?
I didn’t realize that you could render an anamorphic DVD (which many DVDs are now, apparently) and that a DVD player will letterbox it on a 4×3 tv as long as you set it correctly. Should I be doing that with DVDs I make?
If so, on 1920×1080 footage with a PAR of 1, how would I render an anamorphic disc with Vegas and DVD Architect?
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10 Replies
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If you want to render a Widescreen DVD you should use one of the widescreen templates. This will use the proper pixel aspect ratio of NTSC or PAL (depending on what you are using) so that the 720×480 anamorphic image will be represented correctly in widescreen.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Angelo Mike] “I didn’t realize that you could render an anamorphic DVD (which many DVDs are now, apparently) and that a DVD player will letterbox it on a 4×3 tv as long as you set it correctly. Should I be doing that with DVDs I make?”
Most DVDs have always been 16:9, though in the early days it was fairly customary to offer both “Widescreen” and “Fullscreen”. There are Main Concept MPEG-2 templates for “DVD Architect Widescreen”, your choice of PAL or NTSC, which is a good starting point.
Keep in mind that the only actual different on the DVD are a few bit settings…. all the DVD knows is that there’s a 720×480 or 720×576 MPEG-2 file; the “widescreen” setting is a hint to the player how to interpret the data.
Players have a typical setup option which determines what to do with a 16:9 video. They can just play fullscreen (which is what you want on a 16:9 TV), or they can add “letterbox” bars, to represent the 16:9 video in a 4:3 frame. Or they can “Pan & Scan”… the player can show a 4:3 crop of the 16:9 video, fullscreen. Some DVD authoring tools can even provide Pan & Scan vectors, which automates movement of the cropping frame over the 16:9 video.
Since nearly every production television made today is 16:9, the Pan & Scan options don’t get much attention these days.
Now, what’s really going to pop your cork… most films are not only released in 16:9 on DVD, but in 24p, at least for NTSC release. There’s also a template for that….
-Dave
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Right, and I’ve been making DVDs for a while and using the NTSC 24 fps widescreen template. But I read that with anamorphic DVDs you get more vertical resolution, and that DVD players will letterbox them for 4×3 televisions. I guess it’s getting more moot since a lot of people are getting widescreen TVs, but I’ve always been used to having a CRT.
http://www.scenethroughglass.com
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[Angelo Mike] “But I read that with anamorphic DVDs you get more vertical resolution, and that DVD players will letterbox them for 4×3 televisions.”
I’m not sure what you read, but anamorphic has nothing to do with vertical resolution. Its all about squeezing the horizontal resolution and keeping the vertical resolution the same. Perhaps the concept of letterboxing is what is confusing you since the letterboxed 4:3 version is vertically scaled but you don’t get more vertical resolution when you letterbox; you get less.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Here’s what I read that made me post the thread.
https://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/misc/anamorphic_dvd.htm
http://www.scenethroughglass.com
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[Angelo Mike] “Here’s what I read that made me post the thread.”
Wow, that page is extremely old! You have to be careful about old web pages and there are no dates on that page to tell you this. It talks about Disney not releasing any anamorphic DVD’s and Ridley Scott forcing FOX to release it’s only anamorphic DVD for Alien. That must have been 10 years ago. 😉
Today we rarely use the term Anamorphic Widescreen anymore. We just assume that Widescreen is full 16:9. What that page says is:
Anamorphic DVDs allocate more horizontal lines to the movie image.
Which is what I said. You get more horizontal resolution. As I pointed out earlier, you were probably confused by them talking about non-anamorphic widescreen having only 345 lines of vertical resolution becasue of the letterboxing.
You don’t have to worry about any of this legacy from the past. All of the Widescreen templates in Vegas are full 16:9 using all of your vertical resolution. The only way to make non-anamorphic widescreen in Vegas is to use a 4:3 template which would force your footage to letterbox.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
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OK, to piggy-back off this topic, how do I render correctly for DVDA a 24p video with aspect ratio of 1.85:1. I can render easily using Sony AVC by simply changing the framesize to 1980×816, or 1280×544.
However, the MainCOncept template also has an explicit aspect of 4:3 or 16:9 or 2.21:1 (not 1.85:1). Do I use the 2.21:1 and make the width=720 and height=366?
-Jim.
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[John Rofrano] “Today we rarely use the term Anamorphic Widescreen anymore. We just assume that Widescreen is full 16:9. “
Yup. Historically, widescreen was anamorphic. You fit an anamorphic lens to you film camera.. this is a non-spherical lens, which is essentially a normal lens vertically, a wide-angle horizontally, so it optically “compresses” the image. You have to fit an anamorphic projection lens to the projector on play back. Prior to this, they did wide-screen by cropping, so much of the potential image was lost.
DVDs do the same things… in a way. There’s no actual “squeeze” involved, they just define the pixels as rectangular. In fact, they’re also rectangular for SD, just more exaggerated for HD.
[John Rofrano] “Which is what I said. You get more horizontal resolution. As I pointed out earlier, you were probably confused by them talking about non-anamorphic widescreen having only 345 lines of vertical resolution becasue of the letterboxing. “
That’s just like the cropping done way back in the film world. You can crop a 16:9 image out of a 4:3 SD image, and most HDTVs will actually blow that up to 16:9. But you’re losing that resolution. Better to just define a 16:9 format — so they did, but using the same pixel count.
These same issues are likely to crop up as we move beyond HD…
-Dave
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[Jim Greene] “OK, to piggy-back off this topic, how do I render correctly for DVDA a 24p video with aspect ratio of 1.85:1. I can render easily using Sony AVC by simply changing the framesize to 1980×816, or 1280×544.”
You render to 1920×1080 or 1280×720, assuming you want to make a Blu-ray. Like DVD, BD only supports the two formats: 4:3 or 16:9. You can add letterbox bars in Vegas (well, you’ll get them if you have 1.85:1 source material), or you can render out without the bars, and let DVDA add them… which means it has to re-render.
-Dave
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