How do I make a slideshow Title Safe in Sonic DVDit Pro 6?

[valaryc]

Greetings,

After having no luck with Sonic's technical help department, I have decided to ask if any of you out there can help me with a problem I've been having with Sonic DVDit Pro 6.

Basically I've made a slideshow with 82 slides and a fade/cross-over transition sequence which looks great in the preview window but when I burn the dvd, I've noticed my images are way out of title safe and thus are cut off.

My question is how do I fix it so my slideshow images are not outside of title safe? There doesn't seem to be any scale option for the slideshow to make it smaller. I tried to shrink the size of the images down in photoshop but that doesn't seem to work. All Sonic dvd does is blow up the image so it fills the screen anyway, causing horrid pixelation.

I used the 16:9 option which worked great for the vertical images but causes the horizontal image files to stretch all the way across the screen on the left and right.

I really don't want to have to resort to making a slideshow in after effects because it takes forever to do manually setting all the transistion effects.

Anyone know how I can fix this problem or know of a program I can find that may create and render out a slideshow into say a movie file with sound that I can easily import back into Sonic DVDit pro 6?

If you have suggestions, I'm all ears.

-Val

[guns1inger]

You need to create a black frame in Photoshop, at whatever your video resolution is. Add you image to the layer above, and shrink your image so you have black borders all around it.

Photoshop CS/CS2 have video templates that take into account pixel aspect ratios, and have action and title safe guides.

[jtoolman2000]

In fact you can create a New Document in NTSC with title safe markers on it to help you out.

[valaryc]

Sorry guys,

I tried those techniques and they do not work because Sonic DVDit Pro 6 apparently distorts the images based on the border around them.

First I tried placing my images inside a 720x480 background filled with black, with the proper title safe margins around them but when I imported them into Sonic it stretched them horribly out of proportion.

Then I tried to crop them all down with a half inch border around them, thinking that might fix the issue but that too created distortion.

So if you have an even border around, it will distort and if you have a uneven border around, it still distorts but you can adjust it accordingly. What I had to do is find a middle ground between the borders around the images but I also had to make each image slightly squashed horizontally in photoshop so that when Sonic stretches it out, it returns to its intended size (due to the stretch factor of Sonic). Most of my adjustments were - 20px per image (horizontally). I had more trouble with the horizontal borders (which stretches the image too much if not set right) more so then vertical border issues.

That did the trick. I really don't understand why Sonic doesn't take into account title safe but for whatever reason this was a real pain in the butt to figure out that could easily be avoided if they included a overscan crop or something and would not stretch images to fit the picture area. I mean honestly, why if they're trying to create a professional dvd authoring tool do they not bother to address this issue?

Hopefully someone else out there with the same issues will be able to find this discovery helpful.

-Val

[guns1inger]

The issue is square pixels versus non-square pixels. Your PC display uses square pixels. TV uses non-square pixels. For NTSC fullscreen, resize your image to 720 x 540, then import to Sonic