HELP: I Need A Crashcourse in Resolution

[hydrophonicaudio]

Ok, here's the issue that I have: I have burned several .avi files to DVD for viewing in standard set-top DVD players. My process thus far has been:

1) Open file(s) in VisualHub and convert to MPEG-2.
2) Open MPEG-2 encoded file(s) in Toast 8 and burn to DVD in Video tab.


So far everything has been cool...except, I'm having an issue with movie resolution when viewing on TV in a standard DVD player. Let's say I have "video 1.avi" and the file's dimension is 640 X 352. Well, after converting the file to MPEG-2 and burning to disc in Toast 8, when I view the disc in my standard DVD player on TV, the movie still appears to be in the dimension of 640 X 352.

Now usually, I'll let VisualHub just detect the native encoded resolution (4:3 or 16:9) and Toast 8 seems to do a good job of detecting this setting as well. However, I must be doing something wrong in my conversion process, as the files viewing dimensions never change and render on my TV's screen as 640 X 352 instead of at fullscreen resolution or even fullscreen 16:9.

Has anyone else ever encountered this? Would someone mind walking me through setting up VisualHub and Toast 8 properly so that I don't have these issues again?

[Nelson37]

DVD must be 720x480 for full D1. Your video most likely has been padded with black letterboxing. The only other option is to resize your video to the desired resolution.

This quickly gets complicated in terms of square VS rectangular pixels, maintaining correct aspect ratio, etc. There are PC softwares which do this resize more or less automatically, for the MAC i don't know.

It might very well be easier to purchase a DVD player which will play the XVID or DIVX files directly with no conversion necessary.

BTW, you did not Burn an AVI file. You converted an AVI to MPG. This is then formatted (Authored) for DVD Video. This last is what was actually Burned.

Also, 4:3 and 16:9 are aspect ratios, not resolutions.

Get prepared to experience some deep and confusing thought. It takes a while to get around some of these concepts, such as the same resolution could have two different aspect ratios, and the same aspect ratio will have a different resolution on the PC than the TV, though not really because the value of 1 (pixel) is not the same for both.

Ain't this Fun!

[dcabiness]

Whenever I want to burn .avi to a dvd, I just drag them into Toast and let it do the converting and burning all in one step. I have Toast 7, so I'm sure Toast 8 can do it too.

I click on the Video tab, then the DVD-Video radio button, then No Menus from the drop down box, then check 'Play all items continuously', then Automatic Encoding, then I click burn and it does the rest. I normally get 7 24min episodes on a disk and they look just as good as the original .avi files do.

[hydrophonicaudio]

Ok, here's my next question. If I resize the vid to the dimensions you specified, will that stretch the video out? And then once I resize it, how can i tell if I need to maintain it's original aspect ratio or change it? Making a disk image from Toast 8 obviously helps me not waste blank discs, but I'd also like to avoid having to constantly redo everything just to check if the aspect ratio is correct.

[Case]

A full resolution DVD has an aspect ratio of either 4:3 or 16:9, which you can set when converting. When you have a source file with any other aspect ratio, you will have to letterbox or pillarbox to make the frame 4:3 or 16:9.
To convert a 640x352 AVI to MPEG-2 for DVD, just resize it during conversion to 720x480 (NTSC) with a 16:9 flag, as 640x352 is very close to 16:9 (aspect ratio 1.81 vs. 1.78).

[hydrophonicaudio]

Thanks Case. You are truly becoming my "Goto Guru Guy". Now the 640 X 352 dimension I can handle with the info you and Nelson provided. Now the question is what if I get vids in other dimensions? Is there a chart somewhere that shows the various dimensions that vids can be sized in and what their corrosponding aspect ratio is likely to be? What I mean is that since 640 X 352 is more than likely to be in the 16:9 aspect ratio, what are the aspect ratios for other dimensions that a vid might be in (480 X 320 for example)?