Compressor aspect ratio dysfunction

[Todd Nystrom]

Still need it to render at 720×486.
Help 🙂

[Bret Williams]

Your source is 16:9, right? If so it should fill the frame at 720×486 anamorphic. Display shouldn’t be 640×486 in either case it doesn’t seem. If you have bars on the side of a 720×486 4×3 video displaying at 640×480 then something is screwy. That’d be 4:3, but with an extremely squished video in the middle.

[Todd Nystrom]

Yes you are correct Bret. My bad, bad info on 16×9 squished with bars. The frame is not 16×9 with bars. It is 4×3 squished, no bars. So something is off in the preset’s settings. Do you see what it is? I have entered 720×486 (16×9), but it renders out 640×486 (4×3). Check the two screen shots.
Thanks

[Bret Williams]

No it rendered 720×486. But it’s flagged 4:3 and not anamorphic. So it’s displaying it 640×486 which is 4:3 on a computer. It should display it 864×486. But in either case it would fill the 720×486 frame.

[Todd Nystrom]

Great stuff Bret. So what action then do I need to take? Do I need to change a setting in their Compressor Preset? If so, what?
Thanks

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’m so confused.

What do you need to do?

Downconvert and center cut?

Downconvert and letterbox?

Downconvert and anamorphic?

The preset says anamorphic. I’d change the pixel aspect ratio to NTSC (16:9).

[Bret Williams]

I would too. I assumed he was taking his 16:9 HD file and sending it to an SD TV station. In which case I don’t see how a droplet is going to work. You really need 3 droplets. My choice would be center cut, but that might cut off titles if you didn’t design for it. So letterbox would be the only across the board option-but letterbox looks completely stupid on an HD TV. However this droplet says anamorphic in the title of the droplet, yet the pixel ratio is set to square. It should be .844 not 1.25. Do TV stations even have a use for anamorphic? A broadcast TV station would have to downconvert anamorphic to letterbox on the fly, instantly removing the extra vertical resolution of anamorphic.

Our local PBS station has a SD and an HD feed. I used to work on a yearly GA Music Hall of Fame awards show for them and when we finally went HD with the show I discovered the hard way that their SD feed was nothing but a center cut of the HD feed. Not a letterbox. That would’ve been helpful info in the edit! All my HD title safe titles were cut off left and right on the SD feed. But hey, so were the titles on Dinosaur Train!

So, what do you want to do? Letterbox or center cut or anamorphic?

[Todd Nystrom]

Thanks Bret. I have no choice in the matter. Here are the specs from the TV station:

Technical Standards
Program must be in one of the following formats:
4×3 Anamorphic 720×486
NTSC Standard Definition
 Beta SP
 Digital Beta
All 16×9 programs that are supplied to us in 4×3 anamorphic formats will be broadcast
faithfully.
They will not be center-cut or letter-boxed. The 4×3 anamorphic PAL programming will be
converted as supplied, and will appear as 16×9 full screen as the producer intended when
viewed on a television that is set to wide screen mode.
-END-

What option do I have?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Dude.

Change the aspect ratio setting to NTSC CCIR 709 (16:9) and transcode it.

Then you’re done.

[Bret Williams]

[Todd Nystrom] “All 16×9 programs that are supplied to us in 4×3 anamorphic formats will be broadcast
faithfully.
They will not be center-cut or letter-boxed.

I’d like to know how they’re gonna do that! This is an SD station, right?