--- Forwarded Message from Derek Roff <[log in to unmask]> --- >Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 18:23:12 -0600 >From: Derek Roff <[log in to unmask]> >To: Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum <[log in to unmask]>, Carine Ullom <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: #7543 In-house DVD & TV display I'm thinking that the problem is simpler than aspect ratios and letterbox. Simpler, but harder to deal with. The American TV standard, called NTSC, includes the specification of "overscan." This started when TV technology was primitive. The idea was, that part of the picture would display outside of the visible area on the TV screen. This way, a viewer would never see black bars around the picture, or ragged video edges. I think it was a terrible idea even then, and should have been abandoned years ago. It causes problems just like those Carine describes. On a computer, editing your video, you see all the information that was recorded by the camera. When you show the same video on a TV, some of the video will be cut off on all edges. The amount that will be lost varies with the particular TV set. You video editing software may speak of the "title safe" area. This delimits the boundaries, inside which all of a title should be readable, even on a TV with the most severe overscan. Aiming for this lowest common denominator means that a large percentage of the video information is lost. It could be that Carine can get acceptable results just by playing back the video on a different TV. Some TVs have a lot of overscan, some have fairly little. Some TVs will let you adjust the amount of overscan, but that isn't common on modern consumer level machines. It is possible in some video editing software to shrink your whole video image, so that all of the picture will show on a standard TV, with perhaps black borders around it. QuickTime Pro will do this, I believe. Final Cut Pro, as well. However, you are resampling the image, and risk degrading the quality. I haven't tried it, and don't know how bad the degrade is. I'm told that the European video standard, PAL, doesn't have overscan. I often wish we all used the PAL standard. Derek >> Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 14:14:28 -0400 >> From: Carine Ullom <[log in to unmask]> >> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) > Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) >> To: LLTI <[log in to unmask]> >> Subject: In-house DVD & TV display > > Hello colleagues, > We have been working very hard here on a DVD documentary of > contemporary social poetry in Spain. After 2 years of field work > collecting footage, editing, and numerous technical glitches, we're > nearing the finish line. I know just enough about Pinnacle Studio > 8, DV, firewire, and burning DVDs to get myself into trouble. Our > current situation is that the DVD plays beautifully on a computer > monitor but not so hot on a TV w/DVD player. That is, the image is > cut off on the top, bottom, and sides. I know that this has to do > with aspect ratios, letterbox, and the like but haven't a clue as > to what, if anything, we can do in our editing process to address > this. Anybody out there have some suggestions? Thanks in advance, > Carine > > -- > Carine Ullom Derek Roff Language Learning Center Ortega Hall 129, MSC03-2100 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 505/277-7368, fax 505/277-3885 Internet: [log in to unmask]