[Doug Weiner]

Perhaps I will be forced to go down the route of blowing up the picture. However, my concern is not making the image soft so much as framing. These are completed 16mm films that I have already preserved in HD. As they are not just a shot or two, I am not going to reframe thousands of shots. If other people want to blow them up for later use, that is fine. My intention is to preserve them as they were presented in a movie theater or on TV long ago, but in True HD. My preference is to leave the black pillar boxes. I understand that this might create a problem with some viewers, so distributors insist on being full 16:9. If that is the case, then I am going down the ‘fake’ moving pillar bar route. If the distributing vendor wants to modify it further so be it.

I do thank you all for the discussion and encourage it as it might turn up some new answers, but before this post gets too sidetracked into a discussion of merits of how to best deal with 4:3 footage to 16:9, my primary reason for posting was to find someone more experienced than myself with designing these moving pillar boxes.

[Doug Weiner]

Thanks for the lead, but its not exactly what I am looking for.

I have transferred 16mm already in HD, 1920×1080, 23.98. The problem is that because the original source material is 4:3 16mm, the HD footage has a black pillar box. My vendors do not want the pillar box. The two solutions are to blow up the image to fill the 16:9 screen which as a result cuts off the top and bottom. The other is to replace the black pillar bars with moving image. Neither solution is good, but the latter is the lesser of the two evils.

I am hoping to find someone who has some experience in the aesthetic of making these ‘moving’ pillar boxes. I have done it in FCP, and its not bad.

My method.
Two video tracks with identical video. On upper track (track 2), crop the image left and right so that I have a video picture of 1440×1080. Then on track 1, blow up the image, 130%. Add a gaussian blur and drop the video opacity to about 70%.

The result, is not bad – for what it is, but I was hoping someone might have a suggestion to improve my results.

Thanks
Doug

[Doug Weiner]

Ok, the answer is to upgrade BM Intensity to 3.9.2. That fixed it, but man, searching their site in support, I could find no mention of this problem or a fix.

[Doug Weiner]

The problem was after I burnt it to a BluRay disc and it showed up on the player/tv.

I think adding to my problem was a frame difference in the audio and video I could not account for. I did not dig deeper as the poster frame solution worked great!

Doug

[Doug Weiner]

John Gedes set me straight. He has a website https://www.precomposed.com/

No answer how to get the movie to loop without the black frame pause, but my original assumption was that I could not change the first frame of video in an button was wrong. (I actually read that in a tutorial somewhere. But its not true.) Select the First Chapter Mark and while keeping it selected, go anywhere in the time line and choose “Set Poster Frame”. That command is under the Timline Pulldown menu or right click on a mac. Viola, now those animated buttons will start playing from there.

Thanks
John

PS. You must select the first chapter mark and not other chapter marks.

[Doug Weiner]

Great. I have 5 more renders to do next week, and will post back here. So, with 12 gigs and 4 cores, what do you suggest?

Doug

[Doug Weiner]

Are you sure? I thought it was a function of cores. 4 got you 2 instances. 8 gets you 6. There was a test on BareFeats about this. Are you actually using your technique?

Thanks
Doug

[Doug Weiner]

Thanks all.

I am going for replication, So I just purchased a copy of DVDit Pro HD. From the promo material looks good. From the forums, looks like it could be a big headache. I will see. All I really need is a way to create a halfway decent basic menu systems to play the individual movies on this compilation disk. We are a small company and investing upwards of 5,000 for mastering software seems steep. However, if I can not make DVDit Pro HD work, well, off to NetBlender and DoStudio.

Thanks
Doug

[Doug Weiner]

OK, I have been reading posts here and searching, and reading some more but am left with some questions about how to encode for files for BluRay DVD so that the disc will work in both the US and Europe.

First, this method worked brilliantly and I can play this BluRay Disc on a Sony Desktop player and HD TV 1080i in the US. (I used Toast 10 and Compressor 3.5)

However, will this disc play on a BluRay player in Europe?

Questions and or misunderstandings:

1) Source Material was a 29.97 AVI file but had a proper 3:2 put into it. I re-encoded it first using Compressor to ProResHQ so FCP could handle it- keeping it at 29.97. Then using the Mpeg2 method for Toast/BluRay prep, kept it at 29.97. Is this going to be a problem in Europe? Do I need to be at 23.98? I can reverse telecine it with Cinema Tools to either 24 or 23.98. (I assume for compatibility, I want 23.98) OR is this just a waste of time and European BluRay setups (the player and or TV in HD) don’t care. If so, I am done.

2) In the future, when I am mastering a real BluRay disc for replication, should my encodes be at 29.97 or 23.98? One disc will be available in the US and Europe.

3) Am I missing the boat here and there is something I need to do or stop doing?

Thanks
Doug