I want 16:9 anamorphic footage to NEVER play as 4:3 pan-and-scan – how???

[Tim Kurkoski]

Yes and yes. You’re at the mercy of the viewer and their DVD player. Even if it’s letterboxed 4:3, they may decide to use the “zoom in” feature. Some people just can’t live without utilizing every last pixel in their display. Don’t get me started on the time my father figured out how to use the zoom control on his DVD player…

[Jack Kelly]

Thanks loads for the very quick reply.

Urg. What a pain.

I come from a background in print and, in comparison, video distribution has an aweful lot of slack in the system. You have so little control over the final look. I at least expected to have some say over the damn framing… sure, I’m well aware that the average consumer doesn’t know their brightness from their saturation… but at least let me frame the image! Urg urg urg. There really should be overrides available so you can encode a DVD to ONLY show in the aspect ratio it was shot for.

What methods

Jack.

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Jack Kelly
London
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[Jack Kelly]

woops… I cut myself off!…

…I meant to say…

…What methods do you guys use to ensure that your 16:9 shows are shown as 16:9? Is it worth putting a little note on the back cover of the DVD to explain the situation to the viewer and hope they can be bothered to change their DVD player’s setup? Or put something in the menu? Or should I stop being so anal and just deal with the fact that most people really don’t care?

Thanks,
Jack

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Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
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[Tim Kurkoski]

While I would love to be able to force people to just leave their DVD players at the default settings, most of them just don’t understand. They’ll likely ignore what you say.

The best I think you could do would be to put a friendly warning on the package (not in the DVD, as they’ll probably feel it intrusive). Possibly as an insert in the case. Something like, “This film was composed to be viewed on a widescreen display. If you have a standard television display, please turn off any zooming or cropping features on your DVD player and turn on the letterboxing feature so that you may experience the full breadth of the . Thank you.”

[Jack Kelly]

Great idea, thanks.

Jack

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Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
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[Geo Cohn]

Upgrade to Encore 1.5.

There are some settings in the internal tables in the DVD files that are done differently between 1.0 and 1.5. The DVD player looks at these settings to determine whether it should automatically build a letterbox image of crop the sides of a 16:9 image when you are using a 4:3 screen.

With a DVD authored using Encore 1.0, some DVD players crop the sides unless you go in and change the player’s settings.

You could also use applications such as ifoedit to make changes in the DVD data prior to burning the DVD.

hth,
geo.

[Jack Kelly]

Thanks a lot for your reply.

Yes, maybe I should upgrade to Encore 1.5. Does anyone know when the next version of Encore will be released? Even better, does anyone know when the 64-bit version of Encore will come out?

Many thanks,
Jack

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Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
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