Aspect HD to DV letterbox: settings?
 

Have Aspect HD 1440x1080i30 video (16x9 of course).

Need to quality downconvert to DV 720x480 4x3 letterboxed.

Created a standard 4x3 NTSC project in PPro 1.5.1, imported AHD video, placed it in the timeline, applied 34% scale in Motion section.

Looks OK on screen - letterboxed and correct proportions, as needed.

Trying to export in Microsoft DV (is that the one I should use?) all sorts of distortions creep in.

Proportions are now all wrong; video has pillar boxes on top of letterboxes; etc.

What are the correct export settings for my purpose - quality downconvert to DV 720x480 4x3 letterboxed?

Suggestion: I use PPro 2.0 now, but if you are down converting a 16:9 HD to DV, why not open a project as HDV, import the file you want to down convert, then use 16:9 DV as an output/rendered file from the original project ? Why go through the motion menu process. Are you saying that gives you the distorted file? If so, output it to a standard 4:3 DV file. Try those, and I think one will work.

Chris, I need 4x3 DV letterboxed out of the 16x9 AspectHD.

And I can't make it work, need to know exact export settings from PPro.

Don't mess with new 4x3 projects and motion. From your original HD project simply export movie to 4x3 DV 720x480 with a 0.9 pixel ratio. The letterboxing will be added automatically.

Thanks David, your suggestion worked.

However the resulting video displays very visible "running" line edge artifacts on horizontal/diagonal objects.

Is that a problem with PPro downconversion? Output DV settings are at 100% quality though.

You could also do a CineForm export to the same format to see if it is DV issue or a scaler issue. If is it simply aliasing you can place a blur filter (radius 2 will be ok) to limit aliasing.

Fantastic! With Fast Blur at 2.0 amount, no more running edges on DV copy!

Once again, thanks David!