Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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[Kevin Monahan] “One would never edit a 720 x 540 graphic directly into the timeline, if you do that, you’ll get small black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.”
Which end up getting cropped off anyways when someone actually sees it. See my earlier post. Name one instance where a consumer will view 720×486. It doesn’t happen.
You’re not looking at this in a practical sense or in a sense that’s relative to 2008. That Apple doc is very old. Those 6 extra lines are trivial, and they get cropped off during delivery anyways. 480 is new size standard for Standard Definition, as defined by the ATSC. D1 486 doesn’t fit into the digital/HDTV world. The proper handling of it is to crop 6 lines or add 6 lines of black. Look at this for example: 1080i and 720p are both based on multiples of 540 lines (square pixel equivalent of 480) for a reason (1080 is 2x, 720 is 1.5x).
Long explanations aside, 480 video should never, ever be scaled to 486, and vice-versa. Apple agrees with this 100% as evident by the behavior of FCP. If you don’t believe me, place 480 video in a 486 sequence (or vice-versa) and see how FCP handles it.
As for stills, again it’s trivial. You can design stills to fill those 6 extra lines if you want, but they’re going to get cropped off anyways when the consumer sees it. All digital SD is 480, not 486. Sonic hardware DVD MPEG encoders with SDI input crop 4 lines from the top, 2 from the bottom to create 720×480 MPEGs. So does Apple Compressor.
Long story short, if someone sends you 720×540 graphics, leave it that way. Don’t scale it.
Sean
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Are there timecode breaks in your capture?
Sean
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Go into your preferences and set it to ignore timecode breaks. Use “capture now” and capture the whole tape. Then you can record back to the tape with new continuous timecode.
Sean
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[Chris Borjis] “There’s a similar argument for graphic originated
dvd anamorphic settings.some say 864×480, some say 854×480”
How on earth would someone come up with 864? It’s just basic math:
16/9 = x/480
x = 853.333
Round to the nearest even number, you get 854. I’m glad Sonic agrees with me :).
Sean
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[Eli Mavros] “When you deliver an SD format like digibeta to a station, do they just crop those six extra pixels?”
Yes.
You should look at the overscan area of any SD broadcast. At the top you’ll see a bunch of garbage (VITC timecode, closed captioning data, etc.) far worse than a solid black line.
Sean
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Eli,
Here’s something else to consider. Nobody’s ever going to see 720×486 video. It doesn’t exist outside of the production world. All video that gets sent to consumers, like DVD and broadcast MPEG, is 720×480.
Sean
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[Eli Mavros] “So, should I just ignore those lines because they are out of action safe”
Action safe? I think you mean overscan area. Yes, you should ignore them.
[Eli Mavros] “should I blow the graphic up by 1% to make up for that not-so-perfect pixel conversion”
Absolutely not. The time to do that, if desired, is when you (or someone else) encodes for the web.
Sean
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[Dave LaRonde] “I use 720×540 artwork all the time. For example, it’s great for After Effects, from which I can then make 720×480 OR 720×486 or even 640×480 with the absolute minimal loss of quality.”
480 should never be scaled to 486. It’s pointless since the 6 extra lines are well within the overscan area. The proper workflow is to simply add 4 lines (of black) to the top, 2 lines to the bottom. FCP 6 handles this automatically when you place 480 footage in a 486 sequence.Sean
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Eli,
IGNORE all the nonsense in the manual. It is extremely dated and totally unnecessary. If you create square-pixel graphics, do it at 540. If it’s non-square capable create them at 480 and make sure FCP knows that it’s non-square (by changing the pixel aspect item properties in the FCP Browser).
Sean
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Put what you need in a sequence. Export Quicktime Movie.
Sean