Black borders added on left and right edges

[Agapanthus]

Recording video from Firewire using NeroVision Express, I found it had black borders on the left and right and attributed this to the capture device (Cameo Convert 800). However on feeding in a Huffyuv AVI (from VDub) with no black borders, these were added back again. (I had hoped to recompress to DV-AVI before editing the file and authoring a DVD)

Ultimately I want to end up with a PAL DVD, so I have been working at 720x576 (The Doom9 guide gives both 720x576 and 704(?)x576 for the DVD standard - why two different values?). However I now find that NVE works at 768x576 (e.g. size of frame saved as a BMP) - presumably to give a 4:3 aspect ratio. So it looks like I have to resize to 768x576 in VDub to prevent the black borders from being added.

Ulead Video Studio appears to do the same as NVE, whereas Windows Movie Maker seems to take whatever size you feed it and stretch or compress (rather than pad) it to fit the output dimensions (if you resize to something weird in VDub, WMM pulls the clip back into shape).

1. Have I understood what is going on correctly, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

2. It’s taken a while to figure out what is going on, and I haven’t even started looking at saving to other formats yet. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I expect someone’s done all this before. But I have found no reference to “native formats” and changes in frame sizes when importing to and exporting from NVE, UVS, WMM etc. Can someone point me to the appropriate documentation/discussion?

[jel]

hi Agapanthus and welcome to the forum!

as you have not received any advice in the newbie forum, i will move this thread to the capture forum where hopefully oneof the gurus there can help you out.

good luck

j

[setarip_old]

Hi!

1) Are you seeing these black borders on a burned DVD or only on your PC?

2) If only on your PC, are you seeing this only with one specific software player or many different players?

[jggimi]

Recording video from Firewire...I'm guessing this is DV, and am moving this to the DV forum for further assistance. The "Capture Forum" is for analog capture.

DV "capture" is really just a file transfer.

[Agapanthus]

1) Are you seeing these black borders on a burned DVD or only on your PC?

No, this is before burning. And it is not confined to DV.




2) If only on your PC, are you seeing this only with one specific software player or many different players?

I start with clip which I encode in VDub (using Huffyuv codec). Then I import that to NVE. Now if I take a snapshot of the imported clip (i.e. save a frame as a BMP), it will show black borders. If I export it as a DV-AVI and load that in VDub it will also have black borders.

Unless the original VDub clip was 768x576 (or other 4:3 ratio). Any other ratio gets padded by NVE and UVS - while WMM seems to stretch whatever you feed in.

As explained in my original post, I am using NVE/UVS to edit and author DVDs. The current chain is:
VHS -> CameoConvert (Firewire)-> DV-AVI file -> VDub -> Huffyuv-AVI -> NVE/UVS -> Video-DVD

[Boulder]

Do you have the aspect ratio set correctly? You could post some screenshots of the settings of those editing and authoring programs so we could see if there's anything funny going on.

[theReal]

You have to consider that on the computer screen you see the full frame, and you see more than what is shown on a tv screen. There are always little black borders to the left and right when you open the DV video in media player or VDub. This black space in the video signal is used for synch information in the analog tv signal, it's totally normal.
So, if you want to go DV to PC and then back to DV, DON'T resize or crop the picture or you'll have to reencode every single frame in the end, losing quality. Only crop and/or resize if your target video is for the computer screen (i.e. XviD)

[setarip_old]

Originally Posted by setarip_old
1) Are you seeing these black borders on a burned DVD or only on your PC?

No, this is before burning. I'd suggest you burn a test DVD and play it back on your TV via a standalone DVD player, in order to see if you actually have this problem at all...

[Mug Funky]

the adding black borders to huffyuv problem says to me nerovision is assuming square pixels for anything you throw at it, and it's resizing to 1.067:1 pixel aspect (that is PAL D1). this would mean having to shrink and pillarbox square footage to get the "correct" aspect ratio, where what you really need is to not have any resizing done at all.

if you get the option (i don't use that program, so i wouldn't know), try "interpret footage" or something similar and force the program to accept that your footage is the correct aspect ratio.