Black bars on top and bottom of DVD video

[Graham Bernard]

[Justin Beaton] ” I set the Project Properties in Vegas to NTSC DV Widescreen, I rendered in the same format, and I set the Aspect Ratio in DVD Architect to 16:9.”

Sure. What you are seeing is to do with the Pixel Aspect Ratio or PAR. These PARs trip-up all of us. Somewhere in your workflow there is a PAR that is NOT 1:1, and maybe something called “Widescreen” instead, which changes the PAR to another ratio. On you go with your work and then finally you end up with, yes, a 16:9 aspect ratio, but that PAR still remains in place. This results in either Bars top and bottom OR Bars on the side – it’s very frustrating.

There are several “fixes”:

1] Film in PAR set at 1:1

or . . .

2] When you render check the Fill Frame option:

This will reduce sharpness a bit ( many many posts here on that one!), as you are spreading the “butter” thinly on your bread – same pixels bigger format.

or . . .

3] Use Pan/Crop to cut into the actual frame.

I think I’ve got all this correct?

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
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[Justin Beaton]

Yes! It is incredibly frustrating. Ok, I’ll try some of the advice you suggested- thanks for your help, Grazie!

[Bob Peterson]

I struggled with this problem long ago. My difficulty was finding the dimensions of a png image file which would not cause letter boxing. There is probably a way to calculate this, but I have not yet found, or perhaps understood, it. I determined by trial and error that a size of 655 pixels x 480 pixels will display full screen on an NTSC video, which is 720 x 480, and not cause letter boxing. Thus, for still images, I always use a size which is a multiple of 655 x 480 such as 1310 x 960 which has twice as much resolution.

A second method, is to use pan/crop on all video events on the time line. Right click within the pan/crop screen, and click on “Match Output Aspect”. This will crop images which are too large, or expand and crop images which are too small. This avoids stretching the image to fill the screen, and gives you control over what is cropped out of an image which does not quite fit.

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Peterson] “There is probably a way to calculate this, but I have not yet found, or perhaps understood, it. “

You multiply the Horizontal resolution by the Pixel Aspect Ratio. So, for example, NTSC DV is 720 x 480 PAR 0.9091 and 720 x 0.9091 = 654.552 which rounds up to 655 giving you 655×480 in square pixels. For NTSC Widescreen you would multiply 720 by a PAR of 1.2121 which is 872.712 rounded up gives you 873×480.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
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