Mixing Aspect Ratios.....

[neil wilkes]

I know it is possible to mix things up with menus at 16:9 and bonus footage at 4:3, but is it possible to go the other way around, and have the main menu structures at 4:3, but 5 bonus short films at 16:9?
I reckon it ought to be, but wanted to check before wasting large amounts of time & the manual is simply no help at all.

Scenarist SD 3.4.3

[Ghitulescu]

yes..

[neil wilkes]

Thank you - I thought it should be, but it is nice to get confirmation.

[Ghitulescu]

Actually, this is the most common "mixture", authoring 4:3 or 16:9 movies involves more or less the same things, while authoring 16:9 menus are more difficult than 4:3 ones, not much but enough that most cheap authoring suites offers you only 4:3 menus.

[rik1138]

Actually, this is the most common "mixture", authoring 4:3 or 16:9 movies involves more or less the same things, while authoring 16:9 menus are more difficult than 4:3 ones, not much but enough that most cheap authoring suites offers you only 4:3 menus.

I suppose that depends on your definition of 'common'... Almost every studio-released DVD you can buy in stores today has 16x9 menus, regardless of the video content... They almost never release just 4x3 menus on a DVD, even if the video is 4x3.

Now, your statement might be true for free/cheap consumer-level products, but not on the professional level...

[Ghitulescu]

Of course I relate to my collection of more than 1000 titles ... but I am as usual an early adopter so if you refer to titles issued 2010 onwards, yes, no idea.

The way I do is simple enough, I set two paths for each DAR for menus - much better than providing several highlights for each DAR.

[djmasturbeat]

that sounds like a good idea. I am still very new to authoring, even more so to making menus and other more "complex" (to me) features, but that sounds simpler if I can figure it out.
Ghitulescu, would you care to elaborate how to do that in Scenarist SD? (iirc that is what you use)

for the record, i also have seen on widescreen movies a lot more 4:3-only menus (on retail discs) than including a 16:9, certainly not for any reason like running out of the 36 button maximum. seems like just not wanting to make both a WS and either a LB or P/S with it.

[Ghitulescu]

I check SPRM 14 (which must be set by the user according to the TV s/he has during the install phase of his/her player) and split the workflow into 2 up-to-DAR identical paths. It's not much more work than combining highlights and P&S masks into a single menu to fit both DARs, but it's more safer (if one doesn't forget to work identical on them, ie there are no differences in navigation between the 4:3 and 16:9 branches, in particular in the debugging part one should make the same changes in both paths :)). The SPRMs should work identical on all DVD-compatible, but it appears that some DVD-playback-devices-that-are-not-DVD-players (like the XBox and some HDD-based mediaplayers) do not observe them, as the next quote found in internet explains.
This problem illustrates how not all DVD players follow the DVD Spec or implement certain features the same way. I would not expect what you are doing to work correctly in 100% of DVD players because not all players use the SPRMs in precisely the same way.

Most Hollywood film DVDs have widescreen menus with the text, buttons and major graphic elements restricted to the center 4x3 area. That way the menus play correctly no matter what aspect monitor the player is connected to without needing to test the SPRMs.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=66426

[rik1138]

Of course I relate to my collection of more than 1000 titles ... but I am as usual an early adopter so if you refer to titles issued 2010 onwards, yes, no idea.

The way I do is simple enough, I set two paths for each DAR for menus - much better than providing several highlights for each DAR.

I've been making DVDs for Fox, Warner Brothers and Disney for the last 9+ years. In that time, WB has always used 16x9 menus (that crop to 4x3 if your player is set to do that, so make sure you check those settings). Fox switched over to 16x9 only menus (again, with the 4x3 crop) back in 2005 or 06... Disney also started doing that, but not necessarily exclusively (but I believe they do now). Prior to that, getting the 16x9 cropping menus was iffy, some players didn't do it right, Scenarist had a bug in version prior to 2.5 (I think) that didn't do the cropping correctly, etc. But none of that has been an issue for years.

We sometimes deliver a 16x9 and 4x3 menu set if we know the content is 4x3, but most of the time they just use the 16x9 set since the 4x3 set looks exactly what the 16x9 set will crop to on a 4x3 set-up player... There's no reason to build them out twice.

I can't really speak for Paramount or Universal as I've never done DVD for them...

I haven't purchased a DVD since Blu-ray came out, so I don't really know what the studios have been doing since then...

Warner Bros uses an authoring system that automatically creates the 4x3 buttons on a 16x9 menu based on the 16x9 buttons (always has). I think the latest Scenarist now does this, but I've never tried it...

that sounds like a good idea. I am still very new to authoring, even more so to making menus and other more "complex" (to me) features, but that sounds simpler if I can figure it out.
Ghitulescu, would you care to elaborate how to do that in Scenarist SD? (iirc that is what you use)

for the record, i also have seen on widescreen movies a lot more 4:3-only menus (on retail discs) than including a 16:9, certainly not for any reason like running out of the 36 button maximum. seems like just not wanting to make both a WS and either a LB or P/S with it.

I've never seen a studio released title with 4x3 menus and a wide screen feature (at least, in the last 7-8 years). That would be flagged by QC as a mistake and fixed... Putting 4x3 menus on 4x3 content could be acceptable. They only time it's acceptable to not use matching aspect ratios on a disc is 16x9 menus for 4x3 content. Granted, I don't own every title released, or have seen them, and I largely ignore menus anyway, so I may have missed some... :rolleyes: (By studio, I mean Fox, Paramount, WB, Disney and Universal... No telling what the smaller studios do...)

Doesn't building separate 4x3 and 16x9 menus mean building all of the menus twice? How is that a time saver? Just create 16x9 menus that will crop to 4x3 when the player is set for that. One set of menus, one set of programming, one set of button navigation. All you have to do extra (in authoring) is adjust the buttons in the 4x3 mode and you are done... No need to split the workflow, no checking SPRMs, it just works...

You'd have to draw the buttons on both 16x9 and 4x3 menus ANYWAY... Why not have that be your only extra work? (And if Scenarist does this for you now, there's NO extra work at all...) Maybe I'm overlooking something, just trying to see what the benefit is...

[neil wilkes]

Other reasons (in addition to the obvious one where all content is in 4:3 aspect) for using a 4:3 menu aspect ratio - at least for me - is that the distortions caused by the non-square pixels area hell of a lot more pronounced in 16:9 than in 4:3, with PAL being the worst by a long margin.
Of course, this still causes problems with so many widescreen TV sets being incorrectly set up, or hooked up via upscaling HDMI connections that automatically distort everything to 16:9.
Hell, even the BBC news programmes cannot get the blasted aspect ratios correct half the time - it is positively embarrassing watching it sometimes (not that a lot of people would even notice these days). Sometimes I wonder why we bother.......because we care, I suppose - even if nobody else seems to.

The way I normally handle things is to do it all manually, and create WS and LB versions as separate images, with the LB version scaled manually. I geberally avoid using PS at all if I can help it, and for 4:3 content I would put this in a different VTS altogether - SPRM14 is a way that O have never thought of using before (spot the Scenarist Newbie) and I will try this ASAP. I don't honestlythink we can worry overmuch about all the various players that are not properly spec compliant, as this would include almost every soft player in addition to the plethora of cheap (and sometimes not so cheap) poor players out there. I believe we should strive for spec compliance all the time, and not try to compensate for bad design in players as that route is the way to madness.

EDIT.
Of course, there is an even better reason than any of the above for separating out 4:3 and 16:9 screens to different tracks.
Using a 16:9 track for both will not give a 4:3 version unless PS screens are added - the standard is to use LB in most cases, and that will not give a full image on a 4:3 set, and only placing graphical elements in a 16:9 image within the PS areas is somewhat pointlessly limiting yourself.

[Ghitulescu]

Doesn't building separate 4x3 and 16x9 menus mean building all of the menus twice? How is that a time saver? Just create 16x9 menus that will crop to 4x3 when the player is set for that. One set of menus, one set of programming, one set of button navigation. All you have to do extra (in authoring) is adjust the buttons in the 4x3 mode and you are done... No need to split the workflow, no checking SPRMs, it just works...

You'd have to draw the buttons on both 16x9 and 4x3 menus ANYWAY... Why not have that be your only extra work? (And if Scenarist does this for you now, there's NO extra work at all...) Maybe I'm overlooking something, just trying to see what the benefit is...
Well, not quite. I reuse the 16:9 templates to obtain those 4:3. Anyway I don't like menus, and therefore I keep everything down to minimum. When I did, long time ago, some projects for the "outer world" the order came to put everything into menus, with transitions and stuff, and we had some issues with the players and TVs (anyway not many were 16:9 at that time), Scenarist version was 2.something, just aquired by Sonic from Daikin. For my personal projects I use freewares.

[TheSkiller]

Other reasons (in addition to the obvious one where all content is in 4:3 aspect) for using a 4:3 menu aspect ratio - at least for me - is that the distortions caused by the non-square pixels area hell of a lot more pronounced in 16:9 than in 4:3, with PAL being the worst by a long margin.
I don't get your point there. As long as there is any non-square pixel distortion (which is there for any type of DVD) why does it matter to which margin the distortion is? You have to compensate for it anyway...?


I check SPRM 14 [...] and split the workflow into 2 up-to-DAR identical paths. It's not much more work than combining highlights and P&S masks into a single menu to fit both DARs [...]
I absolutely agree. Personally I'm using a SPRM 14 routing in almost every DVD that I create because, like Ghitulescu said, it is not neccesarily much more work and it pays off. It's not only useful for menus but also for the actual Titlesets.
For example for one DVD I made I rendered an intro (Blender 3D) in both 4:3 and 16:9 and the appropiate version is played according to what the SPRM 14 says. If it doesn't say anything (like with software players) it will default to calling a simple menu that requests the user to pick his aspect ratio and then things proceed as usual.

SPRM 14 also enables me to present both the WS menu and the PS (yes PanScan) menu in full horizontal resolution in full screen on both kinds of TV sets. In case of a still picture this doesn't eat too much space on the disc to justify using only the PS safe 16:9 menu with PS enabled (which has 75% horizontal resolution in PS mode).
It is not much more work to scale the source 1050x576 menu still to 1) 16:9 straight (1050 to 720) and 2) crop to the correct PS center (787.5 using float resize) and scale it to 720. The two subpics needed are exactly the same as the ones that you would have had to create anyway.


Edit: Btw, I have tested the Xbox360 and it does support SPRM 14 properly, I think it's only the first Xbox that doesn't. I have also tested various DVD-Players and I have yet to find one which doesn't support SPRM 14. But if a player doesn't there is always a default value or a menu to fall back to. :)

[Ghitulescu]

For example for one DVD I made I rendered an intro (Blender 3D) in both 4:3 and 16:9 and the appropiate version is played according to what the SPRM 14 says. If it doesn't say anything (like with software players) it will default to calling a simple menu that requests the user to pick his aspect ratio and then things proceed as usual.

Yes, this is what I do myself. There are lots of guides in the net, including the Adobe website, that oversimplify the DAR checking, something like if it's not 4:3 then it must be 16:9. I check both for 0 (4:3) and 3 (16:9) and the "undefined" states I route to a choice menu, like TheSkiller said.

However, I do all this only for 16:9 movies (pure 16:9, and not 43LB and the like). It saves me the "autotuning" of the system, which may be extremely annoying today, if the player is connected via HDMI(HDCP).

[rik1138]

Of course, there is an even better reason than any of the above for separating out 4:3 and 16:9 screens to different tracks.
Using a 16:9 track for both will not give a 4:3 version unless PS screens are added - the standard is to use LB in most cases, and that will not give a full image on a 4:3 set, and only placing graphical elements in a 16:9 image within the PS areas is somewhat pointlessly limiting yourself.

Again, it all depends on what the end result is... If it's your own stuff, and you are designing it, then you have all kinds of freedom to do creative things...

When I do work for a studio _they_ give me the graphics, already created 16x9, but designed so that when cropped for 4x3 nothing is lost. Yes, they limit the design in that way as it's cheaper, easier, faster and less work for all involved. Those are the key things for the studios... :rolleyes: (And the standard is 4x3 crop, not letterbox, so the entire screen is filled in 4x3 mode.)

In that case, it's a lot less work to just build the single 16x9 (with 4x3PS cropping) than to build two completely different menu sets and program the disc to jump to the appropriate one. Also, that requires QC to go through the programming on both menu sets... Much more work, and the studios don't really care much about 4x3 anymore as it's considered a legacy format in home theater.

I think if I was designing something myself I'd consider creating completely different menus for 16x9 and 4x3... Not just making them fit, but go all out and design something that's practically an Easter Egg if someone changes their setting to look at it. If I could come up with something cool, might as well have some fun with it...