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HDV to DVD Render Settings
I’m struggling to get the correct frame size/pixel aspect ratio to author a DVD with HDV footage. I use Sony Vegas and Encore, and no matter what render settings I try the output has black lines somewhere. The only one that doesn’t do this is where the resolution is 1024×576, although I know this isn’t a DVD compliant format and isn’t accepted by Encore.
Can anyone shed some light on the correct settings?
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4 Replies
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Project property – one of the DVD templates (PAL or NTSC)
Pan/crop at the start of the timeline, right-click and click “match output”
Then render as one of the DVDArchitect templates.
odd magne nilsen
newbie
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This seems like a bit of a backwards/hacked way of doing it. Is this correct? If so, how do you apply the Pan/Crop setting to an entire layer?
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Right, I still get the black lines at the edge though…
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You should elaborate on the “black lines”.. are you getting letterbox (lines at the top and bottom) or windowbox/pillarbox (lines on the sides)?
The most common problem with HDV or other HD formats converting to NTSC DVD is this ugly little secret about NTSC DVD… scaling a perfect 16:9 video to DVD gives you a 704×480 image. But the usual DVD resolution is 720×480. Thus, if you directly render from a 16:9 source to DVD, you get 8-pixel pillars on either side. These should be well into overscan on most TVs, but sure, it’s an issue.
Here’s the math… as with many older video sources, DVD pixels are not square. Normally, the aspect ratio is 1.2121 for 16:9, 0.901 for 4:3 (PAL sizes are different, due to PAL’s 576 lines). So, you find the horizontal pixels from the vertical this way:
H = ((480 * 16) / 9) / 1.2121 ~= 704.
What can you do? Well, you can render MPEG as 704×480… DVDA will accept this just dandy. You may find your player adds in the pillars, though.
The other alternative is to change your video aspect ration ever-so-slightly. Uncheck “Preserve Aspect Ratio” in all of your clips, and Vegas will stretch the video by 2.3% to fill the frame out to 720 pixels wide. Just don’t tell you subjects you’re making them 2.3% fatter!
-Dave
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