Urgent: Finished DVD, Didn't Respect Title-Safe Area, How to Fix?

[Evan Heckert]

Hey all,

I produced my first DVD, finished editing in FCP7, sent it to DVD Studio Pro, and everything went well except for two major issues:

1) I didn't respect title-safe area's, so when playing on a DVD player the edges of the shot are cut off.

2) It looks fine on a wide screen TV, but it's stretched to fill on a 27" CRT TV.


What is the quickest way to fix both?

Many thanks!!

-Evan

[Bart Walczak]

1. If you did shoot it not respecting Title-Safe, then you have a real problem on your hands. You could try to reduce the size of the footage, but that would give you black border when people try to play it on the computers or on TVs that do not cut the action safe margin. Basically, there is no decent solution to your problem.

2. Make sure you select "16:9" option in encoding preferences, and that your timeline is also 16:9.

[Shaun Roemich]

Further to what Bart says...

2. In DVDSP, select the Track in the Outline window, and then in the Inspector (sorry, I don't have DVDSP in front of me...) make sure that Display Mode (or whatever it is called) is 16:9 Widescreen (NOT 16:9 Pan and Scan or Widescreen AND Pan and Scan). It defaults to 4:3, even with 16:9 material.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Originally Posted by Evan Heckert

1) I didn't respect title-safe area's, so when playing on a DVD player the edges of the shot are cut off.

Make your video a bit shorter on all sides than the full resolution. All televisions have around 5 to 10% overscan (not equal on all sides sometimes!). It's basically trial and error, but if you stick to around 5%, no border will be visible on a TV or LCD screen, but it will be visible if you view it on a computer LCD monitor (which has no overscan).