point and shoot videot to DV

[indijay]

Hello all,

I have some footage of my 2 month old using Point and shoot (Canon A710IS and Sony DSC-H7). I am trying to make a DVD combining DV footage (from GS-250) and this point and shoot footage. When I use this 640x480 footage, it creates a black boundary around the video which I dislike so I tried resizing a representative video to (PAL) 720x576 using resize filter in VirtualDub.

I saved file as avi (F7) but the issue is, I can not play back this file using VLC (but can play with Windows media player) Anybody knows why so?

My questions are-
1. To resize these point and shoot videos, is it enough just to use resize filter or I need to use any other filter for finer resizing
2. Continuing first question, few videos are 320x240 and they look really bad after resizing (sort of pixellated), is there any way to get rid of this pixellation? I understand though that such pixellation is obvious, taking into account the source video (MPEG codec-Xing-Sony DSC-H7)
3. Is there any way to automate this rezising process?

Many thanks in advance.

[indijay]

Just curious, if no expert on this block has any answer to my queries..

Thanks in advance.

[edDV]

Are you shooting your stills at 640x480? Then resizing to 720x576?

Better to use a higher resolution for stills, then downsize once to output resolution including any edge bleed or overscan compensation. Photoshop will give you realistic previews in proper aspect ratio.

I haven't done this in Virtualdub recently. If you see flicker, additional filtering may be required.

[indijay]

I think, I wasn't clear enough. I am not shooting stills but 640x480 is the video resolution that I shoot with Point and shoot. This video I would like to use along with the DV footage in the DVD.

[SingSing]

DVD uses mpeg2.

I would suggest you use TMPGenc to transcode both the camera and DV footage to mpeg2, then compile them into a DVD with tool like DVDauthor.

[lordsmurf]

You may need to use an NLE, like Adobe Premiere, for such a task.

[edDV]

I think, I wasn't clear enough. I am not shooting stills but 640x480 is the video resolution that I shoot with Point and shoot. This video I would like to use along with the DV footage in the DVD.

OK got it. 640x480 is square pixel 4:3 aspect ratio. For exact 4:3 full frame you would rescale to 704x576, that is ~1.2x in vertical and ~1.1x in horizontal. This will cause scaling artifacts. Actual pixel aspect ratio for 4:3 PAL DVD is 1.0926 if you want to get exact.

If you can live with ~20% borders (CRT overscan is ~10%), you can leave vertical unscaled and then scale horizontal only to 640/1.0926 = 586. This avoids expansion artifacts.

[indijay]

@edDV,

I found an option in VirtualDub that later on crops to PAL resolution. I am ready to sacrifice few pixels. So now resizing issue seems to have solved.

Now going back to my questions, do I need to anti-alias (or something like that, not too sure if I am using right term here) but I want to get rid of pixellation, how do I do that?

Thanks

[indijay]

Finally,
I found solution to my questions.

The utility DVdate does everything in few clicks. Except the second question, rest two are solved.