Animation Resolution

[chris_rw]

I'm a bit confused about resolutions for animations (I want to be able to submit my film to festivals, ect). It seems like everywhere I look and everywhere I ask there is a different answer to this (maybe because there are multiple ways of doing it?).

I was recently told that I should render out (if I'm going to DVD, widescreen) at 720x480 but the pixel aspect set at 1.2. In Max, it looks very nice, widescreen and when rendered, it is squeezed horizontally somewhat, looking fullscreen. When it is put to DVD, the program restores it back to the widescreen look. The DVD looked very nice. But lets say I want to now make a computer video out of it, manually stretching it back out looks really bad.

I'm just really confused about this whole square pixels, round pixels voodoo! Not sure if I want to go the 720x480x1.2 or just render it out initially as square pixels (and maybe then shrink it to fit the 720x480 if I want to go to DVD)?

Anyway, thanks for any help I can get on this!

[Da_elf]

as long as you tell it to have and 16:9 aspect ratio your video players should always respect aspect ratio. I also go a step further in my videos and render them at 24fps.

[dapeter]

If you're going to try for festivals, you might be better rendering out to something like 1280x720 @ 24p square pixels and then reformat it for each medium... that way you at least would at least have a 720p24 master to work from.

[crazy homeless guy]

i went through this about 6 months ago. i think i wound up rendering out of Max at 864x480. which is the same as 720x4280 with a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio. i simply liked working that way better.

[chris_rw]

i went through this about 6 months ago. i think i wound up rendering out of Max at 864x480. which is the same as 720x4280 with a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio. i simply liked working that way better.

864x480 is the resolution it stretches out to to make widescreen, correct? This ends up looking fine on DVD, no issues?

Thanks for the responses

[crazy homeless guy]

i went through this about 6 months ago. i think i wound up rendering out of Max at 864x480. which is the same as 720x4280 with a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio. i simply liked working that way better.

864x480 is the resolution it stretches out to to make widescreen, correct? This ends up looking fine on DVD, no issues?

Thanks for the responses

i beleive so. i tested several settings with that project, but i think that is what i went with. i will double check when i get home tonight.

[crazy homeless guy]

yep. i was still using a square pixel with 864x480 even when i was writing out aftereffect segments for editing premiere. premiere automatically recognized it as a NTSC widescreen, and assigned the correct pixel aspect ratio. it was easier for me to judge the quality of the footage when i was looking at square pixels, instead of distorted ones.

[paulison]

the whole PAL/NTSC standard difference in resolution adds another dimension of confusion, but i wont make this more complicated by saying the settings i've used!.

Basically though i'm rendering out as per the format that movies are stored on a PAL DVD. when the player stretches things back out, it looks smoother. this is a different dimension to 864x480 which i think is the NTSC equivalent - but i agree that this is the way to go. fps is also a point of confusion... but PAL is 25?, NTSC is 30. When you are playing back on a DVD player you really should stick to one of the standards

the least confusion IMHO is to render at one of the HD standards with square pixels but this is very slow especially if you go up to something like 1080p

[visions]

What would be the correct resolution for PAL if one does not want to use the pixel aspect ratio of 1.0666.

I tried to figure out the 1.2 principle for NTSC but was not successful.

Thanks
Vivek

[RenderMonkey]

Actually the resolution is not altered when going from 4:3 to 16:9.

The resolution for 4:3 in NTSC is 720x480 and PAL 720x576. The image aspect is 1.33. Pixel aspect ration is in PAL 1.06 (not sure about NTSC on this one) which means that the pixel are slightly rectangular.

In 16:9 the image aspect ration is 1.78. Therefor in PAL the pixel aspect is 1.42 and the pixels are even more rectangular.

You can set this in MAX rendering dialog. Set the proper resolution, 720X576 for PAL or 720x480 for NTSC, and lock the resolution. In the right spinner below wich says image ratio (not sure since im not at my workstation now) set it to 1.78 to get 16:9.

Turn on the safe frame in the camera viewport to see the correct rendered output.

When rendereng the images will look compressed. DVD and alla other television oriented equipment will actually queeze the image vertically (and not stretch the image horisontaly as some people pointed out above) wich will give the right image on the tv. This is called anamorphic 16 by 9.

A dvd, or any other videoformat either for that matter, cannot handle any other resolution than 720x576 or 720x480. It will only adjust to how much to squeeze the image vertically.

cheers!

[Blitterswitch]

I agree with everything which RenderMonkey has said. Well written. I looked for ages for a guide to this information and that is the most cleary written example of this information.

[visions]

RenderMonkey,
thanks for the reply.

I actually wanted to know the extended resolution to use if i wanted a square pixel ratio, similar to the 720x480 becomming 864x480 with square pixels.

All my work is for the PC but also gets transferred to DVD, and since i edit on the PC, i am uncomfortable with the squashed / stretched images that a non square pixel ratio delivers.

Thanks
Vivek

[RenderMonkey]

OK! Is in India on PAL? If so the square pixel for 16:9 is 1024x576.

Well then your all sorted.


Good luck!

cheers!

[meanadam]

A guide? Like Wikipedia? There are tons of articles there about video formats and sizes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio

Make sure you burn your DVDs and/or set up your video editor as anamorphic or it will stretch the image back to square pixels and the AA will be a mess (not to mention the image will be "stretched" of course).