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Flagging
Hello —
I’m a producer who’s self-distributing a documentary — and we’re authoring it on DVD Studio Pro.
The film was shot 16×9 anamorphic, but my editor is having trouble with the “flagging” function on DVD Studio Pro. That is, it’s naturally supposed to come up letterboxed on 4×3 TVs and widescreen on widescreen TVs, but it only does this on about 60% of the machines I’ve tried it on. Sometimes it doesn’t letterbox on a 4×3 TV so the image looks stretched — and sometimes it letterboxes on the widescreen TV which quishes the image.
I understand that “flagging” isn’t going to be 100% effective, but the 60% rate isn’t acceptable. And it’s not just a matter of the flagging not working on older DVD players — new ones don’t always do it either. But when I put in a Hollywood film on these “problem” machines, they perform the way they’re suppose to.
What might we be doing wrong?
Thanks very much!
Dan -
1 Reply
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You cannot do something wrong if you do it right 🙂
If you encode as 16:9 and have your project 16:9 and selected letterbox, it should work.Now a question for you, do other titles play correct in the same setup as your disk fails? If so, there is something fishy with the setups. (Most likely the DVD player is set up that a 16:9 monitor is attached and there is no SCART cable or it’s broke)
If your titles fail while others are good, check your workflow.
Basicly what happens with flagging:
You have to set up your DVD player so it knows if there is a 16:9 monitor is attached. If you do so and the content is flagged wide, there will be a + 5volt signal on one of the scart pins, putting the tv in wide. Mind you, a lot of CRT 4:3 sets are in fact also 16:9 sets, as they can scale. So if you have one of those, also set the player so it knows a 16:9 set is attached.
Now if you set the player to 4:3, the player will letterbox the content. Horrible if you have a 16:9 set, as people will press the scale button…Bouke
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