-
DVD Studio Pro – jumps between video and stills
I’m authoring a DVD that starts on a still image menu of a blurred map, fades to another image, then goes into a short animation before hitting the video content. Something like this:
Blurred Menu BG -> clear map image -> map animation -> video
The still images are all pulled from the video, so I thought it would be a fairly seamless transition. The “clear map image” is, in fact, the first frame of the video “map animation”. The fade goes well but there’s a jump between the “clear map image” and “map animation” steps. It seems like the “clear map image” is a couple pixels narrowed on both sides than the video. Why would this be?
In Preview, the image shows up as 72dpi, 720 x 404 (PNG file with square pixels). The video in Quicktime shows up as MPEG-2 at 720 x 404 (using Compressor).
Any ideas why this is happening or how I can fix it?
-
2 Replies
-
You can’t….when you do these kind of jumps from piece to piece it needs to access different locations on the disc
Remember that DVD is 25 yr old technology 🙂
-
You didn’t explain why you maintained the separation between those components as separate assets on the DVD. If there really isn’t any need for them to be separately addressable or used elsewhere on the disc, I would bring them all together into one timeline in your editing software, then it can all play back seamlessly on the disc.
Yes, still graphics are very tricky, because of PAR (pixel aspect ratio), so a still of one size doesn’t match a video of the same size. On top of that, Compressor/DVD Studio Pro cheats and fills the frame with the image. Encode the same video to M2V in Adobe Media Encoder, and you’ll get very thin letterboxing (AME doesn’t cheat).
So you have two things working against you: PAR and DVD player having to jump around to play back the assets. Best to put them together in video editing, and the DVD only has one asset to play.
Christopher Smith
CBN International
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up