[Taynt3d]

Sorry, man… I wasn’t offended, and I didn’t mean to offend you. So if I did, I apologize. Also, I’ve posted this question in a couple of different forums, and I’m getting a little mixed up about what I posted where — I’ve probably posted more clear descriptions in other places. My bad. I think it’s more that I’m frustrated by this and you’re questioning of why I want to do this made me even more frustrated than I already was. I should have taken a deep breath before posting…

Back to the problem at hand though. I’ve had some success by using the reduce interlace flicker switch on the events that look the worse. I thought I had tried that already, but maybe not. I think this problem has something to do with the fact that my widescreen footage is literally being resized smaller for the letterboxing, and that resizing is affecting the lower and upper interlaced fields a little differently such that I’m getting serious jaggies on horizontal motion. I also tried blend deinterlacing (making progressive) my project settings, then rendering back out to interlaced 4:3 NTSC DV. This seemed to also help a lot, but that round trip de-lace/re-lace isn’t a good thing to say the least. However, these two options seem to produce much better results than doing nothing. I haven’t yet tried Procoder like the other guy recommended yet, but I will, and I’ll report back my findings.

[Taynt3d]

Not that it matters, but I definately made my point. I gave my exact situation, and I gave my exact need. I understand that many people come in these forums understanding so little that they may in fact be trying to solve the wrong problem (in this case, that would go something like this: why not just use widescreen end-toend?). However, I explicitly stated EXACTLY what I needed in the very first post, then I reiterated it in another post. So, I’m not sure WHAT you’re talking about because I couldn’t have been more clear about what I was trying to do.

That said, you seem to be more interested in the “why” than what I’m interested which is the “how.” I didn’t feel that I needed to bother anyone with the why because it has nothing to do with the how, but I can see why it matters to some people because sometimes you have no idea who you are dealing with in the forums, and you have no idea if they are just completely clueless and missing the whole point.

Anyway, to answer some of your questions… YES, you can put widescreen-formatted video on many forms of tape. However, if the device/player etc. doesn’t understand the flag, what you’ll get is a “squished” image. For example, let’s say you record in true widescreen PAR=1.22 onto DV tape. If you play that DV tape connected to a regular 4:3 TV, chances are about 95% that the tape will play fine, but the entire widescreen image will be squished into the TV (it’ll look stretched vertically — it’ll look kind of like you used an anamorphic lense but never stretched the image out to widescreen width). Now, if you plugged it into a widescreen TV (or a really modern 4:3 TV), the TV would recognize it’s widescreen and automatically play it that way (or on a really modern TV, it might letterbox it for you, but that is WAY the exception, NOT the rule). That is just one example.

More importantly however, you might have a client, or a TV station, or whatever, that MANDATES you provide them with a MiniDV print-to-tape version of your show in 4:3 format. Period. End of story. Ask them why they want it that way, all I know, is that’s the way they want it, and that’s the way I have to give it to them, or they won’t accept it. Like someone else said around here, it’s not the preferred way, but this often comes up and you need ways to deal with it. Basically, this requirement is mostly done for compatibility reasons. A client or whoever’s whole operation is based on 4:3, and they want everything in 4:3 or they won’t use it. It’s their standard, and they do not want to deal with letterboxing it themselves (probably because of this exact kind of crap I am trying to fix right now). Hopefully that puts more context around the why…

[Taynt3d]

I think you missed my point. I MUST HAVE IT IN 4:3. Yeah, end-to-end widescreen is easy, it works, no problem, but that’s not my issue. I’m looking to solve a specific problem. Think VHS. Think client wants printed-to-tape MiniDV in 4:3 format. Think about all of the documentaries and shows you see on TV that are originated widescreen but shown letterboxed. There are a lot of reasons to need to do this.

[Taynt3d]

OK, there’s the first real advice I’ve seen. Sounds like a decent plan. I have access to procoder, discreet cleaner, and sorenson, but I tend to use Sorenson for web compression stuff only. But I’ll give that a try because I have no problems at all with widescreen end-to-end. So I’ll render to widescreen DV, then let procoder take a crack at generating 4:3 DV letterboxed. Is that what you are saying?

[Taynt3d]

Why? That’s easy…

99% of the TV’s out there are 4:3. Now some TV’s are smart enough to letterbox widescreen footage but most are not. And DVD players are almost always able to letterbox the widescreen footage on there own. But sometimes you just need to go 4:3 for some reason. I mean seriously, how many letterboxed shows on standard def TV do you see these days? Discovery channel alone is probably half letterboxed widescreen videos these days. Trust me, I prefer end-to-end widescreen as much as the next guy. Anyway, I am able to get the letterboxing working in Vegas, but I get REAL BAD combing on horizontal motion, much more noticeable than if I just stay in its native aspect ratio. And I’m looking for someone who knows how to fix this problem of mine. Thanks!