[S. Marcotte]

[Steve Roberts] “You should search the COW for Rick Gerard’s “Pixel Madness” or “Dr. Strangepixel” tutorial.”

“Strangepixel” Terrific article. Thanks for that – SGM

[S. Marcotte]

Taken care of.

My problem, from the get go, was that I was trying to avoid rendering my plates with a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio. I was secretly hoping my live-action 19:6 footage had been poorly captured, thus changing the standard I was working with.

Turns out, the ugly aliasing I was seeing on my 1.2 PAR renders are more about display than anything else. The aliasing doesn’t show up on TV. TV makes them square. Looks fine.

What with the 6 months I needed to grasp fields and interlacing, this PAR thing, I hope, has finally given me an understanding of video. How does one juggle all of this? Baffling. I guess film enjoyed a Kodak-centric monopoly that prevented various standards from popping up everywhere.

Off topic. Thanks for replying.

[S. Marcotte]

Yes (if I understand your question correctly) Maya can render my plates at any PAR I choose.

The problem for me is really as simple as it sounds: My live-action footage has 720×480 res and 1.2 pixels. My rendered background must therefore also have a 720×480 res and 1.2 pixels. This causes some loss of detail in the render. Square would be better.

But if I render out with square pixels, the plate no longer fit the live-action comp size. Too narrow, horizontally. No surprise there, I suppose.

Since you advise against using two different pixel aspect ratios when compositing, that means I should find another way to retain detail in the render.

Am I getting this right?

[S. Marcotte]

This should be simple and workable. All I have are animated cameras and the odd door swinging open. These were going to be rendered in passes anyway.

Many thanks.

[S. Marcotte]

Thanks for the reply. Brought my atention to issues I didn’t even know existed. Will look into Re:vision. I used their fieldskit once and was quite impressed.

[S. Marcotte]

.M2V? OK, that’s one I haven’t tried or heard of yet. Unfortunately, I don’t have PP2 at home (only at work). This could be interesting.

Thank you.

[S. Marcotte]

DVDShrink is for ripping and burning. That’s the furthest thing from my intent. I need to edit a demo from stuff I DOPed and is now available on DVD. Calling up producers is not an option, there are far too many of them.

Renaming to Mpeg doesn’t solve the issue: My PP1.5 doesn’t like mpeg. Either it won’t open it, or I only get a small portion of the renamed file, or it’s wildly out of sync. Mainconcept’s mpeg pro plugin doesn’t work either on my system. I need to avoid mpegs altogether. Converting to lossless AVI is a problem, because PP 1.5 only takes a precious few codecs of the ones I have access to. And the time it takes is ridiculous. No more converting. Please, lord.

Thanks for the adspyro suggestion. I’ll look into it.

[S. Marcotte]

[Noah Kadner] “Are you trying to build an adapter for lenses of some sort?”

Nothing nearly that fun or interesting, I’m afraid. I’m trying to motion track some footage. The software is far more cooperative when you type in the gate size. If I make it seem like a life or death situation it’s only because the shot is a particularly problematic one and I need all the info I can get.

S.

[S. Marcotte]

Thanks. I’ll try to get confirmation on that because I have a lot riding on it.

S.

[S. Marcotte]

If a CCD has a rectangular shape, what PART of that rectangle measures 2/3″?

a) The width?
b) The height?
c) The hypotenuse?

That’s all I’m looking for. Nothing more. I’d be forever grateful if someone could answer this. I’ve called every Panasonic dealer in town, and no one seems to know.

Thanks for the help – S.