Does anyone know the correct resolution for rendering an animation for delivery to a HD 16/9 format television so that it is widescreen and not a stretched version of 4/3? I was considering just rendering it out in High def (720p) but I know there really aren’t any affordable HD DVD players out there. (Plus I’d hate to waste the render time)
I guess what I am looking for is the correct resolution, aspect ratio, pixel ratio, etc to render a animation to be put on a DVD and played on a progressive scan DVD player connected to a HighDef LCDTV?
How did that work for you ? Im trying the same thing - need to output to a 16:9 screen which runs at 1366x768. However, when I use the 16:9 ratio I calculate the frame should be 720x405 pixels instead of 720x486 ? I did a test and it seemed ok excet the picture did not fill the screen the way it should do.
I generally render 800x450 square pixels, and then use my DVD authoring app to reformat into 16x9 anamorphic. That way I don’t have to deal with the anamorphic issue untill the end of the pipeline. When you start mixing in other stuff in the pipeline, like compositing, things can get a bit hairy when trying to work in the finalized format during the whole process.
“Anamorphic” lets you do 16x9 footage, using all the pixels of regular 4x3 format. It automatically letterboxes the footage on a 4x3 screen, and will fill a 16x9 screen. But it does it by utilizing nonsquare pixels that usually don’t display properly in editing programs.
Which program do you like to use? So then, you would do all of your editing in Combustion, or AE, then export that file as a movie, and then import into your DVD authoring program? I’m obviously new to all this.
Previously, we had been running our final composited/edited footage through Discreet Cleaner to get it into the MPEG compressed 16x9 anamorphic format that ReelDVD required for authoring. Unfortuneately, neither Cleaner or ReelDVD work on XP64, so we don’t do that anymore. Also, ReelDVD, while allowing more functionality than your do-it-yourself-home-dvd app, was fairly buggy. We now do our DVD authoring on DVD Studio Pro, which unfortuneately is OSX. But at least DVD Studio Pro isn’t very picky about the file formats it can import, so we can just throw it a 800x450 square pixel clip and tell it to display in 16x9 anamorphic without having to reformat anything. Its a very powerful app. I haven’t yet tried Adobe Encore to see how well it works as a DVD authoring app.
I’ve rendered out to 854 x 480 before and used this to convert directly into dvd mpeg footage using dvd studio pro or quicktime. The mpeg file will end up being 720x480 with anamorphic set so it stretches the video horizontally back out to 16x9. Apple’s dvd player will take proper 16x9 anamorphic video and stretch it out to the same resolution once created. This is also the exact same pixel aspect ratio as 1280x720 and allows you to work completely unstretched until you convert to dvd.
Just a little added note… AVI files dont properly support anamorphic video. So you need to encode out at the proper resolution with 1:1 pixel aspect ration. Because its mostly depends on the play if the AVI will play at the proper resolution or not when using anamorphic.
I know you guys are using DVD video (mpeg2) but thought this might be a bit of handy information if you are doing tests.
It has been a while since I rendered for video… but I am just curious. Do you guys still render at 29.97i, or do you render at 30p? With the way that DVD players work now, you could probably render at 24p and let the DVD player to the 3:2 pulldown.
I wouldn´t trust a dvd player to do such complex transformations on your precious footage Maybe your client will have the worst of players, unable to play fluently his wedding boring video :?
I thought it was all DVD players since the dawn of time that did that. Based on the little I know, any player that is progressive scan (99.9% of them) has 3:2 pulldown on the fly. Besides, many DVDs are encoded at 24p, so what are people without 3:2 pulldown supposed to do?
I think Chris is right about this. See DVD FAQ for an explaination but the basic jist is here…
A disc has one track (stream) of MPEG-2 constant bit rate (CBR) or variable bit rate (VBR) compressed digital video. A restricted version of MPEG-2 Main Profile at Main Level (MP@ML) is used. SP@ML is also supported. MPEG-1 CBR and VBR video is also allowed. 525/60 (NTSC, 29.97 interlaced frames/sec) and 625/50 (PAL/SECAM, 25 interlaced frames/sec) video display systems are expressly supported. Coded frame rates of 24 fps progressive from film, 25 fps interlaced from PAL video, and 29.97 fps interlaced from NTSC video are typical. MPEG-2 progressive_sequence is not allowed, but interlaced sequences can contain progressive pictures and progressive macroblocks. In the case of 24 fps source, the encoder embeds MPEG-2 repeat_first_field flags into the video stream to make the decoder either perform 2-3 pulldown for 60Hz NTSC displays (actually 59.94Hz) or 2-2 pulldown (with resulting 4% speedup) for 50Hz PAL/SECAM displays.
I need to do a widescreen DVD as well for a plasma…and this thread has just confused me more
I was going to just render out at 720x 486 at 25 FPS which i was told is the standard PAL resolution for this format. Im guessing this is with square pixels?
so can someone just clear up exactly what resolution I really should render this out at so that it doesnt have that crap stretched look when played?
Thanks for any help!
AFTER MORE RESEARCH:
720x576 (1:1.25) is PAL which will stretch out to the equivalent of 1024x576(1:1.78 or 16:9) when played back on a dvd player.
So we can either render out as 1024x576 in square pixels and encode the MPEG2 without the “DAR” flag set so that it doesnt stretch, or:
Render out at 720x576 with a pixel aspect of 1.422 so that the frames look squished up on the PC but look proportionally correct on the DVD player when encoded with the DAR flag (whatever that is ill find out)
do it with square pixels would be my suggestion seeing as how when you stretch you loose quality. when you squish you might get some kinda artifact. best not to take chances and work with wysiwyg
Maybe your client will have the worst of players, unable to play fluently his wedding boring video :?