Image is too big on screen. A way to fix?

[ruggerjvd]

I am backing up some of my personal VHS tapes to DVD. Everything worked OK, imported clips to iMovie, and burn with iDVD with chapters, etc. However, the resulting images when viewed on screen are actually too big (i.e. the TV Safe area). I would even prefer a letterbox image with the black bars so I can at least get the whole image on the screen.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? Will an ffmpeg re-encode do anything, and if it does, how can I get it back to iDVD to burn it?

thanks

[Frobozz]

That's odd. Do you have this same result when playing the movie on your Mac with DVD Player. If not, maybe some settings on your standalone DVD player need to be changed to prevent this overscan.

[cbkilner]

A few things. The iMovie image will show the overscanning, so WYS isn't supposed to be WYG.
I also thought iMovie or iDVD had a checkbox for TV safe area (might only be for iDVD slideshows, though).
Lastly, I'd also check cfx's plugins for iMovie at www.imovieplugins.com They are cheap and work. They have "zoom", "eliminate borders", and "aspect ratio" plugins that might do what you want.

[WiseWeasel]

It's a shame to add a black border all around, as different TVs have different 'safe zones'. Also, future TVs (some HDTVs, and I believe all plasma screens) might not have a safe zone at all, and so it would be a shame to have to watch the DVD with black bars all around it. Also, you capture at 720x480 pixels, so you would have to do some scaling to add bars, and that would lose some quality and possibly distort the image. Tread carefully into that domain...