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Question about Aspect Ratio
When I render my video at 864×486 “widescreen square pixels” in .avi format to my desk top it is uncompressed and full quality. When I test play this in Windows Media Player 11 it plays at full screen edge to edge top to bottom on the player. But to get the best possible picture for a dvd I understand that .mpeg2-DVD is the best format to render too but when I do, it won’t go full screen in the player,or on the TV set from a dvd player. There is black bars all the way around. What am I doing wrong.
Jim -
4 Replies
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[Jim Harrison] “When I render my video at 864×486 “widescreen square pixels” in .avi format to my desk top it is uncompressed and full quality… But to get the best possible picture for a dvd I understand that .mpeg2-DVD is the best format to render too but when I do, it won’t go full screen in the player,or on the TV set from a dvd player. There is black bars all the way around.”
This sounds like more of a DVD authoring question than an After Effects question.
How are you making the DVD?
DVDs require MPEG-2 video (at up to around 8 megabits per second). The raster size must be 720×480, whether they are 16:9 or 4:3. Widescreen 16:9 video should be flagged as anamorphic with your DVD authoring application so that the DVD player stretches it out properly on playback.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Plus, compressing to mpeg2 from AE is not such a great idea- usually the DVD authoring software has the ability to compress the video files. Also, encoding apps like Adobe Media Encoder are designed to compress footge- so render out of AE using an uncompressed codec and then compress to mpeg2.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist -
First of all, thank you for replying to my post. Your comments were very helpful and I did get it to go to full screen. I am new to after effects (about 2 years now) and mainly do 3D slide shows for people. My DVD authoring program is “Adobe Premiere Elements 4”. Not a top of the line program but it does the job for me. I am working with a Widows PC and Vista OS. I would really like to ask you guys what procedure you would use to render a video in AE and export it to Premiere Elements 4 to get the best quality picture burned on a DVD? I am looking for the settings in both programs. I work in widescreen mostly.
Thanks for your time.
Jim -
The normal SD widescreen DVD resolution for NTSC is 720×480 with widescreen pixel aspect ratio, 29.97fps, 48,000Khz stereo audio. Render QT uncompressed (animation or PNG codec) or uncompressed avi from AE.
I’m not sure about Premiere Elements since I never used it.
I would normally use Encore or even iDVD on a mac. Bring in all assests for my project and burn the DVD image (or export the final DVD files if you will) and the program will take care of the compression to mpeg2.Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
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