and tested.... And NEVER switch during a project that is due on
a certain date :)

Why? If you want to make a 16:9 anamorphic DVD you'll have to
stick to the 16:9 templates and settings. NOTHING else.

Actually, Excalibur, Neon, and Tsunami have all been updated to work correctly with Vegas 5. Right now it's more of a distribution problem. Gary will send e-mail to Excalibur and Neon purchasers next week (he's at NAB this week). I'm trying to get the updated Tsunami install on the Zenote site.

OK well here is the problem...

When i work with the widescreen template, my letterboxed footage has thick black borders all around it (bottom, top, left right). To elminate this, i change the pixel aspect ratio of my footage from .9091 to Widescreen 1.2121, it stretches out the image and the right/left black borders are gone, but the bottom and top borders still remain. When I use the pan/crop 16:9 preset, the image is still smushed and black borders appear on the right/left however they are smaller. I can't figure out how to render out perfect anamorphic footage with the correct aspect ratio and NO black borders.

Could it be the way I captured my footage? I used the letterbox mode in the DVX (not squeeze) and simply captured to AVI. Is there a step i overlooked?

Yes. Letterbox is really 4:3 with black bars added in the camera. In order to get it to 16:9, you need to pan/crop out the black bars and render it to 16:9 using a DV widescreen template. Leave the pixel aspect on the timeline set to .909.

OK, I left the project settings as normal 24P NTSC (non-widescreen) along with my footage at .909. I cropped to 16:9 (using the 16:9 Widescreen TV aspect ratio preset) and rendered as widescreen 24p footage. Black bars still appear on top and bottom of my footage...

Do i want to stretch the footage to fill the frame and then render in widescreen? Wont I lose resolution doing this?

How often do you rotate?
 

Did a search, found few posts about rotation.

How often do you rotate? I guess it is dictated by how good (or poor) the result is? Which is my real quesiton.

I have a long segment which could use a slight rotation. However it could go w/o and still be kind of OK. Hence I am really thinking about rotating but it is going to take a lot of CPU.

Comment?

I try and rotate every ten thousand miles...

NAB Vegas Streams - Now Downloadable
 

There was some technical issues with the quality of the vegas 5 and DVDA2 Training Seminars - Original Streams

So, they are now Downloadable on the Image Beam Website.

You will find the quality is a lot better, now.

If you like what we've done for you - let us know.


Jay Mitchell

Southern California Vegas Users Group

So now things are getting clear. You just shot 4:3 footage with
an in camera letterbox. You could have done this more flexible
in post. But alright.

In this case I simple would not go to an anamorphic DVD. Why?
Because you don't have the increased resolution to begin with.
Scaling up your footage to the higher resolution will yield NO
benefits quailty wise and only add problems.

The only good thing (in this case) about going to anamorphic
DVD would be that a 16:9 TV will better understand the signal.
But you can still display a letterboxed image correctly on a 16:9
TV if you switch by the modes manually.

I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at. Are you saying the
footage isn't level and you want to correct that? That might be
a possability although you will loose some resolution and
sharpness in the process.

It's way way better to just check your level when shooting. The
best for this is a tripod with builtin levels or you can attach a
small loose one.

Rob, you are right.

Actually I did do exactly that. But for some reason one person in the frame was leaning back quite a bit (I think he had too much the night before, you know...) while the other is stright up. Since it is wide-angle all the way from a diagonal view, the "diverging" look is acceptable, but it looked like it is not leveled.

I hate loosing the quality too, but in this case it might be OK to be a bit more blurry, the bride probably don't mind.

Actually I just finished rendering it, and at full-screen playback, I can't tell any difference. Guess we can't be sure until I burn a DVD.

Thanks.

Yes, if you want the picture part of your frame to fully fill the 16:9 screen, you need to stretch to fit. Yes, you will lose resolution.

Thank you for your effort it's appreciated.

can DVI become a "buying/upgrade group" for discounted Vega5+DVDA2?
 

is this possible to offer a group discount to us members here @DVI? whaddya folks think?