How to keep aspect ratio 4/3 and 720×576 when exporting to hd resolution?

[Joe Barta iv]

The best way to keep anything from scaling the video is to create a 1920×1080 sequence and place your 720×576 footage in it. It will look like this with a big black border all around.

That will maintain your footage in its original size. Then export at 1920×1080 and build your blu-ray.

Joe

Living the SuiteLife!
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[Jeff Pulera]

Blu-ray players, and many newer DVD players, will have hardware upscaling built into the unit, along with HDMI output, so that when you play a DVD, it will be converted and output as HD to the TV display.

In my experience, the benefits of this are two-fold: first, the quality is superior to software upscale to HD using NLE, and second, you don’t have to go through all the extra work of creating a Blu-ray of your SD material.

The player hardware should normally display the image properly – if your 4:3 is being stretched upon playback, check menu settings in both the player and the TV. Do NOT use an older DVD player with analog outputs, that is bad. That will output as SD and then the display simply “blows up” the image to fill the screen and the quality can be very poor.

I can play old DVDs I’d created many years ago on my Blu-ray player out to a 70″ plasma via HDMI and they look fantastic and the image is not stretched or molested in any way. Let the player do the work for you.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Markus Scharfenberger]

Thank you for yiur support.
I have tried it with a 1920 x 1080 project but found that the video inside the frame is too smal 🙂

I am currently using the sequence preset HD 720p which keeps the original video in an acceptable size.

Any tips if that is the correct sequence preset for an interlaced source?

[Jeff Pulera]

The “p” in 720p stands for Progressive – there is no interlaced version. For HD, only 1080i provides an Interlaced format, but it uses Upper Field First and I believe your DV source may be Lower Field First, which can cause image quality problems.

I stand by my earlier post, encode to best quality you can as SD video and let the DVD or Blu-ray player take care of the rest, I don’t believe in trying to upscale SD footage just for the sake of upscaling, unless one is working on an HD project and must incorporate portions of SD legacy footage into it.

Thanks

Jeff

[Jeff Pulera]

I re-read the original post and realized you actually desire the video to have black surroundings, while usually the request is how to remove the black surroundings. My apologies.

Personally, I’d not be able to watch a video that way….I still like the idea of upscaling DVD player which should not stretch the image. To each his own I guess 😉

Jeff