Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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The real question is what do the people doing the DVD authoring want you to deliver? If you were sending a project to my facility, I would ask you for an HD Quicktime ProRes HQ. We know how best to encode that to a good quality DVD. Or we could work from an HD tape master or an XDCAM disc of the finished master.
Unless you are familiar with the fine points of DVD encoding and downconversion, avoid doing the encoding yourself. A two hour program needs to be encoded correctly using a high quality encoder for best results, especially if you are going to a single-layer DVD-5.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I’m not a DVD Architect user, but the general principle is that anything 16:9 in DVD must be anamorphic to display correctly in widscreen. If you create a menu at 720×480, it does stretch to fill the 16:9 frame on playback as you discovered.
If you are using Photoshop to create your menu artwork, you can use the preset for NTSC 16:9 video. To do it manually (or in other software), create an 864×480 document (or 960×540 square pixel document), lay out your menu as desired, then resize to 720×480 without constraining proportions. This is important — it gives you the anamorphic “squish” horizontally. Your artwork then should look the same as your 16:9 video footage, which is also 720×480 anamorphic.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
[Kenji Kitaoli] “1. If I have variety of texts made on photoshop or illustrator, and I want to draw a lines underneath it, which has the exact same lengths as the words, how would I go about?”
The easiest way is to drag a guide line onto your document. Make sure the rulers are tuned on, then click on the horizontal or vertical ruler and drag into your document. Drop the guide line where you want it (at the end of text characters, for example), then draw your underline with the line tool. You can make the ends snap to the guide lines.
[Kenji Kitaoli] “2. How do I make lists of words with exact spacing between each column?”
Get the start position of a word close to where you want it using spaces to pad out the empty space, then type the next word. Do the final alignment using the character-pair kerning function to finely adjust the position of the word (ALT+ left or right arrow). You might want to use a guide line to make it easier to line up a column of text.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
HDCAM-SR can record in the 720/59.94PsF standard, not in 23.976PsF. (There is no 720/23.976P native tape format.) It would be a whole lot easier for you to master in 1080/23.976PsF on SR than to do anything else. Besides, that is considered the universal mastering format for HD, from which any other deliverables can be created. Most likely you will need to deliver both 1080i and 720P if your project gets wide distribution. Or your distributor might want only the 1080/23.976PsF.
If your on-line process happens in 720/23.976P, you can make a Quicktime file of that, but then you need to figure out how you will distribute the final product.
720P broadcasters are the minority (Fox & ABC, their O&O/affiliate stations and cable channels plus A&E’s cable channels). Everyone else is on 1080i.
The 720P footage will hold up well blown-up to 1080P. You don’t start to notice the difference until you are looking at a 42″ or larger monitor.
I would test whether you can cut the DNxHD36 and DNxHD60. You should be able to cut them together if you don’t need to off-line using multicam editing. Then you don’t have to transcode multiple times to do your off-line.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Because the stop button, by DVD spec, termintates execution of the instructions on the DVD disc and clears the GPRMs, you can’t “trap” the execution of the stop button. You can fiddle with the execution of the menu, top menu and return buttons if you are working in a spec authoring program but not the other buttons.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Matt,
You need to finalize to be able to do anything outside of the machine that made the DVDs.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If the Avid export refuses to make the precise specs you want, then export the footage same size and re-render it in After Effects. Being a resoultion-independent system, you can make it render any size or aspect ratio you want.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
A lot depends on what HD standard will be used for the final master. You said you wanted to on-line in 720/23.976P, but be aware that this is a file format only. Before you edit anything you need to settle on the HD standard for the master. For broadcast or film recording, you will want a 1080P master (with a 1080i conversion for broadcast). I would much rather see you up-rez the 720P footage, since you will most likely end up with everything at 1080P sooner or later.
Whatever workflow you decide on, test it now before you begin your cut. Cut a few shots together in multicam. Then conform them using the original video. Make sure you can color correct your sequence. If there is a problem, find out now and adjust your methods until you have a process that works.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Ours all had acceptable calibration out of the box and stayed that way. Do you have access to an HD or NTSC waveform monitor? That would tell you whether the monitor or the Avid is green. (Unfortunately the 1700s don’t have the vectorscope display inside the monitor.)
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Are you feeding the monitor HD-SDI or component from the Nitris DX box? If component, check your cable connections to the monitor. Put all the adjustments in Video Output Tool on their default positions and select SMPTE color bars. Is the monitor still green?
It’s unlikely that a Panasonic LCD would drift that much over a short period. If you are feeding it good signals, it’s likely the monitor is sick.
We have several 1700s that are a few years old, and we never had to adjust any of them.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City