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Portrait Disply Nightmare!
Okay here’s a mind bender…
I’ve been assigned the task to create a presentation for CES for a major company. The product is a portable media player. It has a 320×240 display. Normally you would turn it on it’s side to view video. They are making an oversized prop of the device for the show. They will be placing an NEC 4020 LCD Information Display inside the prop for the screen. This display’s native resolution is 1366×786 (WXGA.)They will be turning the display on it’s side (portrait) to place it inside the prop and they need the content to be produced so that the presentation displays only at the upper portion to simulate the 4×3 aspect display of the device. The botttom of the screen will be a black rectangle.
To make things even more complicated, for legal reasons it can’t be HD. So here’s the problem… How do I create the presentation in 4×3 portrait so that I can then turn it sideways, and place it in a 16×9 (if that’s the right thing to do) anamorphic comp so that it will play back correctly (from the internal DVD player of a laptop) in the visible area of the prop, and I can then re-purpose the presentation by scaling it down into a 320×240 comp (portrait) so that it will play on the actual device!
HELP!
Thanks,
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4 Replies
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Nice catch! I have the client looking into that right now. The client makes the laptops as well as the potable media device.
I’m still trying to understand, if the resolution of the DVD player is the 720×480 of SD anamorphic, is that good or bad?
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I’m assuming that you meant you’re working with a 1366×768 display (16:9) and not a 1366×786 display (which would leave some letterboxing if you tried to display a widescreen DVD at fullscreen).
With that assumption in place, I would also like to assume that you are planning your output for a Widescreen NTSC Video DVD. Is that correct?
If all of these assumptions are correct I would recommend first creating an NTSC DV Widescreen composition (we’ll call this the ‘Render Comp’), then creating a composition with NTSC DV Widescreen Square Pixel attributes, only with the horizontal and vertical resolutions inverted (let’s call this the ‘Working Comp’).
Now place your Working Comp in your Render Comp and rotate it -90
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Your limiting factor actually isn’t the DVD drive, it’s whatever DVD software you choose to use to display the DVD. The information on the DVD will be read by the drive as long as it’s not a bad burn and the disc is compatible with the drive (i.e. not a +RW disc in a -R drive)… as far as the drive is concerned, data is just data. It’s just important that whatever emulator you use is able to interpret the Video Data on the DVD correctly as 16:9 Anamorphic.
I can’t think of any DVD Player Software that wouldn’t support 16:9 video off the top of my head, and if there is one then the developers should be shot =)
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
[Dave LaRonde] “I was thinking that there may be some laptop out there with an HD DVD or Blu-Ray player in it… a totally different kettle of fish from SD DVDs.”
Ah, I see…
Well, as far as I understand it the only computers with HD-DVD drives in them at this point are Toshibas (self-promotion I guess, god bless an open market) and that they should be able to read standard DVDs as well.
I’m entirely unsure on Blu-Ray drives, I know that they are out there… waiting… lurking.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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