4:3 to Widescreen issue

[acilec]

I am creating a DVD with DVDIt PE 2.5.4 which is going to be widescreen. The way DVDIt works, all of your m2v (or avi) files must be widescreen or all must be 4:3. I have about 20 DV tapes, of which 19 are in widescreen, and am making a collage of footage. Since almost all of my material is widescreen, I want to letterbox or somehow convert the 4:3 AVI file so that it will appear correctly on either a widescreen tv or on a letterboxed standard tv.

We have a widescreen tv, but I think we are the only ones in the family currently that do. Everyone else will be watching it with black bars on top and bottom for the widescreen material.

How can I convert the one 4:3 AVI so it will display the way I want it to on both a widescreen and conventional tv once it is burned to a DVD (I believe DVDIt PE supports anamorphic--I know it supports widescreen.

Also, after I have read in the widescreen DV tapes, do I need to do any special conversion on them to make them appear wide on a widescreen and letterboxed on a 4:3 screen so that the aspect ratio will be correct for each clip?

Thanks,
Acilec

[ulfschack]

How can I convert the one 4:3 AVI so it will display the way I want it to on both a widescreen and conventional tv once it is burned to a DVD (I believe DVDIt PE supports anamorphic--I know it supports widescreen.

In order to preserve the correct aspect ratio for 4:3 material when viewing on a widescreen, you can either:

1) Author as 4:3 (meaning your 16:9 material would have to be cropped, resized and have borders added to it (and viewed in "zoomed mode" to fill out the screen) => loss of resoulution, less sharp ... not a great solution, in fact it stinks.

2) Author as 16:9 while adding black bars to the left/right side of the 4:3 material. This way 16:9 video will look fine, and 4:3 video will fill out the screen top2bottom (on a wide screen), but 4:3 on a 4:3 screen will be a small picture with a thick frame around it (on all sides).

... take your pick.

You didn't mention whether your 16:9 DV is real or fake, i.e does it have black bars in the video allready. To find this out just capture to HD and have a look (in VirtualDub f.i.). And if it is indeed fake (most actually are) it would be daft to use anything but method 1).

So we need a little more info to conclude

Cheers

[acilec]

The 16:9 is fake...it is a Sony TRV900....I'd like to get an anamorphic adapter but they're about $600 so that'll have to wait...thus it only uses about 2/3 of the CCD coverage area, but since I have a widescreen tv, I still prefer this so we have a wider looking aspect--I've gotten used to that. With the filter, it would use the entire CCD instead of cropping.

a box within a box is fine since that first tape is the only 4:3 material (as far as those watching it on a 4:3 TV)...sounds like authoring in 16:9 will achieve the results I want then.

I still haven't been able to solve the crackling/staticy audio (posted in the Adobe Premiere section on Matrox's RT.X100 forum)...it plays fine in a regular sound player, but when playing the audio and video together in Adobe Premiere, I have crackling/staticy sounds throughout the duration of the tape in a fairly repeatable pattern. My sound card is the Audigy and I'm using a dual athlon 2100+ MP, 1.5 GB RAM. One drive is SCSI 15k rpm and the other is a firewire. Parhelia for display and RT.X100 for the video hardware board.

Any thoughts on solving this mystery would be greatly appreciated. I have a separate avi and wav...as I mentioned, the wav sounds fine in audio players, but not in conjunction with the picture in premiere. I tried unjoining and re-dropping in the audio, but that didn't work either (I couldn't figure out how to get the audio track to play in that scenario).

Acilec

[ulfschack]

Actually the point of my post what that you in the "fake" case should do exactly the oposite :)

You see the only way you're gonna get full screen on your 16:9 TV is if you zoom (either before encoding by cropping and resizing OR by letting the TV do the job for you) In any case the vertiacal resolution is going to suffer, because no matter how you see it there still is only 360 (down from 480) real vertical pixels in you picture. They're lost once and for all because you chose to cut away 25% of the information when shooting. Now you know better :)

So you should author/encode as 4:3 and keep the black bars in the "16:9" video.

cheers

PS have you tried making a dvd or an svcd from your Premiere edits? Does the sound problem remain? Is it just when you play from Premiere?

[Zeppeliner]

I am not familiar with DVDit but if it produces vobs, and not just burns directly in some way or the other then you can use IfoEdit to change the display parameters afterwards by working directly on the vobs. It is rather easy though it may seem difficult the first time.

So, just author the whole thing in the mode most of the clips are (16:9 - display mode should be 16:9 LB - so that dvd players automatically letterboxes the video when viewed on a 4:3 set) and change the ones that should be 4:3 afterwards.

[acilec]

Thanks to both of you for the replies...I will play around with that some more and look at ifoEdit as well...it produces the VOBs and can burn, or I can use Nero to burn after it produces the DVD Folder (full of VOBs).

Thx,
Acilec

[ulfschack]

Sorry, but I just have to point out that fake 16:9 material authored (or encoded) as 16:9 WILL be severely out of aspect, since you're doing a double 16:9 (adding black bars to the existing (fake) black bars. You should encode(author) as 4:3.

Zeppeliner, you're right about how easy it is to change afterwards, but why go through the unnecessary trouble?

cheers

[acilec]

I can't help but be curious if Premiere is doing some sort of interpolation when I suck the video in (the 16:9 material)...I know it is definitely cropped, however, it does not SEEM to put black bars on the top and bottom...I need to pull in a 16:9 vid and set the aspect ratio to actual to make sure--you are more than likely correct and I don't mean to second-guess, but I still can't help but wonder.

Would y'all have any guesses on the static/noise sounds that are playing in premiere when I play the video (I have the rt.x100 board)...the wav plays perfectly fine in windows media/realplayer, but exhibits the defect mentioned above when I play them together in premiere. When I separated the audio from the video and dropped the audio track in manually, it didn't have sound (probably just me doing something wrong, I'm sure). I've not been able to solve this.

Acilec

[Zeppeliner]

Originally posted by ulfschack
Zeppeliner, you're right about how easy it is to change afterwards, but why go through the unnecessary trouble?


Because I see no need to encode with black bars and thus lose resolution on the actual imagery when the dvd player can produce the black bars on the fly while playing. It doesn't matter for 4:3 sets, but if viewed on a 16:9 set the 16:9 material won't have to be stretched vertically to remove the encoded black bars.

[ulfschack]

Zep, What you don't seem to get is that there allready are blackbars in the video. 120 vertical pixels out of the total 480 are black allready and there's no way the DVD player is going to treat those differently from 360 valuable pixels unless you crop and resize. That's why doing 4:3 out of it will make matters simpler. Actually I'm convinced that that was what the dv-cam makers had in mind when adding this "feature". People know 4:3, default is 4:3 ... so if you do nothing it'll be fine ... that kind of logic, you know :)

@acilec: Why are you so keen on getting the sound from premiere right. It's only for editing. If the end result is ok I wouldn't work myself up over it. It's annoying of course, but playing around with "properties" might do some good.

cheers

[acilec]

real 16:9 (preferably 3 CCD) will fall into the more affordable range of say $1500 and under. From what I last saw 6 months ago or so, it wasn't even close. That would be truly ideal.

[acilec]

Continuing on my attempt to get my DV to DVD, I've found that I have a major sound problem--and I'm not sure how to fix it.

I am importing DV tapes into Premiere 6.5...the problem though is that the tapes on the Sony TRV-900 (2 tapes are 4:3, the other 18 are 16:9 (not true widescreen though...cropped, but I have a ws tv.))

When I render the video, whether as M2V or whatever else, I get the chipmunks...the sound timing is in synch, but the frequency makes us all sound like the chipmunks.

The camcorder tapes were all recorded in 12-bit on the Sony DCR TRV-900 camcorder. But in premiere for the RT.X100, I only see the choice of 48000 khz (and there was one case I think I saw 44100, but have not seen 32000 anywhere)...I'm assuming this is why it sounds like the chipmunks.

Where/how do I change this setting, or is there a program that will convert the sound to 16-bit correctly?

By the way, I exported it as 48000 khz (and also imported it from the DV that way). Again, the WAV plays fine in real player (without any static), but not after the rendered one is produced....that one plays in realplayer as the chipmunks (and the one in premiere plays all staticy and poppy in terms of noise artifacts).

Please, please, please help...I'm almost out of time for the holidays to create my video.

Thanks,
Acilec

Thanks,
Ross

[bb]

Don't know for sure if that helps, but have you tried to save your audio as WAV file, and then convert it using BeSweet? You can set the resampling, and it's done through the fabulous SSRC.

bb