AARGH! Is it possible to capture to widescreen DV-1 or DV-2 AT ALL?

[ambushed19]

This has been driving me crazy! Right now (I'll have high-quality sources later), I want to capture source VHS/Beta videotapes that were recorded in the older 4:3 aspect ratio. My capture device is a new Canopus ADVC-55 that replaced my ADVC-50, the primary difference being that the 55 can accept 4:3 source input but seems to internally convert and puts 16:9 widescreen output out on the Firewire cable.

I tested the widescreen capture capabilities of the ADVC-55 by capturing part of a 4:3 videotape using VideoStudio 11.5+ to NTSC 16:9 MPEG-2/DVD output. I wrote this DVD-format output to a physical DVD, and when I played it on my widescreen TV in widescreen 16:9 mode, it played properly in widescreen mode, filling the entire screen without having to change the display mode on my TV. (This was NOT the case when I captured using my old ADVC-50; to watch that output, I had to manually change the TV's display mode).

My confidence having been boosted by this test, I went ahead and, using VideoStudio (I tried both v11.5+ and X2 Pro), captured a few 4:3 videotapes, but this time in DV mode in VideoStudio, using the "direct from CD (i.e., Capture Device)" option so that the captured video would be of the highest quality. Then I used NeroVision from Nero 8 to transcode the DV to widescreen 16:9 DVD-folder output (I use Nero for that step because I like NeroVision's cool 3-D menu-creating options much more than VideoStudio's offerings). But when I played these DVDs, they all ended up in 3:4 aspect ratio such that I was forced to manually change the display mode on my TV again after all! AARRGH!

I then performed several experiments to try to figure out what was going on, including trying to transcode the existing DV-format captured video into widescreen 16:9 DVD-folder format using Nero as well as both VideoStudio 11.5+ and X2 Pro, and also capturing into DV format using Nero instead of VideoStudio, but NOTHING produced 16:9 output.

What I finally discovered is that no matter what software you use to capture into either DV-1 or DV-2 mode, the results are ALWAYS forced to 4:3 mode! It seems to me that there is no such thing as 16:9 DV-1 or DV-2 format (perhaps because the standards were developed before widescreen 16:9 video existed yet)!

Or am I wrong about this? Does anyone know different? How can I produce widescreen 16:9 DVDs with maximum quality comparable to uncompressed DV quality, such that when I edit the captured video into separate clips (including editing out commercials and so forth), I don't get generational MPEG quality loss?

Please don't tell me that such generational loss is unimportant because the videotape source is already of relatively low quality; I accept that in the case of videotapes, but there are times when the source will be fresh, super-high quality material and I'll need to know the answers of my questions for those occasions.

Thanks!

[jagabo]

NTSC DV always uses a frame size of 720x480 (3:2). What controls how the picture should be displayed (4:3 or 16:9) is a flag in the DV data. If your encoding/authoring software doesn't automatically detect the correct DAR you should be able to override it manually. This is usually done by right clicking on a clip and selecting Source Properties or something like that.

[edDV]

I think most of your issues relate to Videostudio settings. Try capturing with WinDV and play back with VLC (using "Video", "Deinterlace", "Linear"). Default will be 4:3 through the ADVC which will be H stretched to 720x480 in the storage file and then played as 4:3 in VLC to your computer monitor.

If you cap wide material (e.g. a non-encrypted DVD player), you will need to edit the flag to wide or take care of it in Videostudio clip property settings.

There may be a dip switch on the ADVC-55 to force the flag to wide or 4:3.

Note that DVD does exactly the same h - scaling so force yourself to understand these concepts. Once you understand basic capture and playback in 4:3 and 16:9, you will understand better the Videostudio project, clip and encoder settings.

[ambushed19]

Thanks, jagabo and edDV!

Alas, I cannot seem to do this! After numerous attempts with zero success, I'm pretty sure that no software I've tried will produce 16:9 DV output files, unless either of you know something I've missed. I've tried many different capture programs, including WinDV, VideoStudio v11.5+, VideoStudio X2 Pro, Nero 8 Capture, and Microsoft MovieMaker, but for the life of me, I can't get 16:9 widescreen DV output files!

Also, it seems that no one knows of a dip switch on the Canopus ADVC-55 to force the flag, but 4 dip switches are undocumented (I tried flipping them to different settings, but I couldn't figure out a way to set the flag, although there just might still be a way, no one I've found knows the answer).

In each program, I scour the manuals and settings/options for enabling 16:9 mode for input and output and have tried zillions of permutations of them all, but no matter what I try, the output DV files always end up in 4:3 aspect ratio.

Do either of you know a particular capture program that's compatible with Windows XP Pro SP3 with which I can force-set the DV flag to 16:9 or otherwise capture 4:3 source into 16:9 DV output files? Because I am just plain stumped!

[jagabo]

You don't need to create 16:9 DV files. All you need to do is tell your editor they are 16:9 after you import them.

The AVI header doesn't support aspect ratios. This is why many programs that deal with AVI don't automatically recognize the DAR of DV (and other codec) AVI files. I think Enosoft DV Processor (free for personal use) can force the 16:9 flag within the DV data.

[edDV]

Thanks, jagabo and edDV!
...
Do either of you know a particular capture program that's compatible with Windows XP Pro SP3 with which I can force-set the DV flag to 16:9 or otherwise capture 4:3 source into 16:9 DV output files? Because I am just plain stumped!

I still see a conceptual disconnect. When you say "capture 4:3 source into 16:9 DV output files", what do you expect to see on the screen? Pillar box? H-stretched 4:3?

[edDV]

Right. All that Betamax, VHS and DirectTV 4:3 aspect material is supposed to display like this. Any horizontal stretching is altering the aspect ratio.

[Cornucopia]

You're getting things mixed up AFA what part of the process does what...

1st - **CAPPING** You're capping from your VHS box, through you ADVC-55, through FIrewire to a DV capping software. ALL of them, I repeat ALL of them consider this a straight 1:1 transfer of raw data. Now, if this were a camera, I'd say that whatever the setting on the camera was (4:3 vs. 16:9) would be what was saved in the resulting DV file.
Since you're using a converter box, that choice moves from the camera to the box (IF you're given that option, if not then ALL of your caps are likely 4:3).

BTW, 16:9 is completely allowable/acceptable and supported in DV files.
However, this flagIS contained in the muxed DV data stream, not in the AVI container. Also note, it isn't totally true that AVI doesn't support AR flags, it's just (1) convoluted and difficult to work with and so little supported and (2) not pertaining to DV streams (which are different than your standard VIDS+AUDS streams).

Since the DV AR flag is in the muxed DV data stream, you MUST use apps that support it. Now, here is where your newness may show, as there are plenty of apps that do support it, but not these "push-one-button" consumer apps (this included Nero, and IMO VideoStudio). They support ONLY 4:3 mode.

2nd - **ENCODING/CONVERTING** None of this really is anything to worry about, as it's most likely that your 16:9 material on VHS was NOT anamorphic, but rather REALLY a letterboxed 4:3. So you've been using 4:3 all along. It's now a matter of which app is doing the conversion from DV to MPEG2 for your DVD material, and what settings those are.
The proper way to do this would be to open up your DV material in an editor such as Virtualdub, add a deinterlace-via-unfolding fields filter, add a crop of top and bottom 60pixels each to create a 720x360 file, add a resize to push the 360 back out to 480, add another reinterlace-via-folding filter, and export/frameserve to an MPEG2 video encoder, with settings expectations of the source (and destination) as being 16:9 anamorphic.

3rd - **AUTHORING** You have to have AR control over your authoring app as well. You can do all the other stuff right, but if your app's settings are wrong and you can't or don't make an adjustment to them to make them right, it'll look wrong in the end. So, an authroing app is needed that supports 16:9. I'm pretty sure both Nero and Videostudio do, but you've probably got the settings or source file wrong by this point.

FWIW, I suggest using Nero ONLY for burning (even then, I use ImgBurn more often now). There are pletny of freeware/shareware authoring apps available here that allow more control, starting with DVDLab and DVDAuthorGUI.

Scott

[ambushed19]

At long last, I've found an excellent realtime solution after all!

In this thread here in this forum as well as many others, I asked how I could capture 4:3 source material to full, widescreen 16:9 DV files in realtime using an ADVC-55 such that the DV files had the 16:9 flag set -AND- the video in those files actually was already in 16:9 full widescreen format with perfectly proportioned (i.e., not "short and fat") visuals and also without side-bars or other sub-optimal output. I didn't want to have to do it by post-processing, such as for example by cropping or otherwise manipulating the DV files later.

I consider this mandatory because I want to capture 4:3 source material in high-quality 16:9 DV file mode in realtime. A secondary requirement was that I want to be able to always keep my widescreen TVs in widescreen mode rather than being forced to change to "4:3 stretch mode" to watch the captured 4:3 source material.

Pretty much everyone I asked (except jagabo) -- including Grass Valley's Tech Support staff -- told me that it was simply impossible to satisfy all these requirements in realtime using the ADVC-55 (and possibly any other ADVC consumer product), even if I used expensive, high-end capture software.

Finally, after long weeks of extensive, and extremely frustrating experimental efforts, I finally found a way to meet all those requirements for Windows users by using the free-for-personal-use Enosoft DV Processor!

At first, I tried enabling the Enosoft DV Processor's "Aspect Ratio Conversion" feature, but that failed utterly because that produces the side-bars or distorted visual proportions everyone warned of. So here's what you need to do: Disable the "Aspect Ratio Conversion" feature entirely, and instead, enable the Embedded Data Processing "Aspect Ratio Signal" to "16x9 FullFormat", as shown here:



Note, however, that Ensoft specifies that the product "Requires Microsoft® Windows Vista® or XP (with SP2) and a 32-bit or 64-bit processor that supports SSE2 instructions". It may also require a certain minimum CPU speed, but that isn't specifically mentioned. I'm guessing, but since the unlicensed (for personal use) download page allows one to download the software for a considerable number of additional Windows operating systems, that specific hardware and operating system requirement might only apply to realtime processing (the product also allows the user to convert existing 4:3 DV files to 16:9 DV files that fit the requirements I specified earlier, but this isn't done in realtime).

(Note also that the software allows the user to choose either "IEC 16x9 FullFormat" or "ETS 16x9 FullFormat" (as well as several other formats). I'm in the U.S. and I'm using NTSC, but I haven't been able to detect any visual differences between IEC and ETS standards. YMMV....)

Hooray! An excellent solution exists after all!

Finally!

Thanks, jagabo, for your suggestion above to try Enosoft's DV Processor! I couldn't have done it without you...

[jagabo]

At long last, I've found an excellent realtime solution after all...Enosoft DV Processor

Thanks for the detailed report on that. It should help someone else out in the future.

One thing that I wanted to mention is that there is no way for an analog NTSC signal to indicate whether the video it contains is 4:3 or 16:9 DAR (as opposed to an analog PAL signal which I believe can contain a flag along with the closed caption data). So the ADVC really has no way of knowing if the source is 4:3 or 16:9. Up until the advent of widescreen televisions it always contained 4:3 so it wasn't an issue. This is also why (at least partially) HDTVs usually have an option to display the composite/s-video inputs as either.

[edDV]

This has been driving me crazy! Right now (I'll have high-quality sources later), I want to capture source VHS/Beta videotapes that were recorded in the older 4:3 aspect ratio. My capture device is a new Canopus ADVC-55 ...

What is your source that produces the "wide" horizontally squeezed 720x480? Most ATSC tuners and cable boxes output 16x9 as letterbox. 4x3 VHS/Beta videotapes won't be 16x9 unless horizontally stretched. They will be full height 4x3 or letterbox (various heights).

[ambushed19]

At long last, I've found an excellent realtime solution after all...Enosoft DV Processor

Thanks for the detailed report on that. It should help someone else out in the future.

You and everyone else are more than welcome. I was so jazzed at having found such an excellent solution to my problem that I very much wanted to share it so that others wouldn't have to go through what I did! (Do you think it might make a good "sticky" post?)

Since I'm not that far from a newbie myself (perhaps you noticed? ), I posted the solution in detail along with the screen caps so that my single post was sufficiently self-contained such that other newbies (well, at least those using NTSC; I never experimented with PAL) could implement it without much, if any, additional help needed.

Well, except for the IEC vs ETS issue. Under what circumstances would/should someone choose one over the other?

One thing that I wanted to mention is that there is no way for an analog NTSC signal to indicate whether the video it contains is 4:3 or 16:9 DAR (as opposed to an analog PAL signal which I believe can contain a flag along with the closed caption data). So the ADVC really has no way of knowing if the source is 4:3 or 16:9. Up until the advent of widescreen televisions it always contained 4:3 so it wasn't an issue. This is also why (at least partially) HDTVs usually have an option to display the composite/s-video inputs as either.

Thanks again. That elucidates precisely why my thinking was originally flawed and why the many, many other suggestions I received were inadequate or far too jargon-filled for me to correctly comprehend. (That's no criticism of jargon in this or other specialized domain at all, of course. Jargon is extremely useful when experts communicate with other experts; it's only an issue when newbies like myself are involved).

(Now, this newbie is going to reply to edDV's most recent question -- as soon as I figure out precisely what he's asking and how to answer him!)

[Cornucopia]

That's what I said, too!

Personally, I don't know what the OP is talking about:
I just tried--AVID Composer, AVID XpressPro, Sony Vegas, Adobe PremiereProCS3, even WindowsMovieMaker.
I can get each and every one of them to use either 4:3 or 16:9 DV material!
Sounds like a PEBKAC error.

Scottt

[JohnnyMalaria]

ambushed19 - glad it works for you! I would have suggested it myself but I thought you were describing a different issue.

Anyway, regarding the speed: changing the flag is trivial. For live capture there is minimal CPU use. For existing files, you can make the software run at the maximum possible speed instead of realtime. Changing the flag doesn't in itself require SSE2 instructions but the software as a whole does. For Intel CPUs, anything made since 2000 will have SSE2. The software was designed to perform realtime functions on a 1.5GHz single core laptop. Appropriately, the software came about because I was fed up trying to watch my widescreen DV footage on a regular TV all squished and too lazy to capture/convert. The laptop served as a realtime aspect ratio converter.

I never did watch all those tapes...

John.

[ambushed19]

This has been driving me crazy! Right now (I'll have high-quality sources later), I want to capture source VHS/Beta videotapes that were recorded in the older 4:3 aspect ratio. My capture device is a new Canopus ADVC-55 ...

What is your source that produces the "wide" horizontally squeezed 720x480? Most ATSC tuners and cable boxes output 16x9 as letterbox. 4x3 VHS/Beta videotapes won't be 16x9 unless horizontally stretched. They will be full height 4x3 or letterbox (various heights).

I apologize, but I'm not quite sure precisely what you're asking and how best to answer it.

I suspect my problem lies in the premise of your first question. I must have expressed myself rather poorly regarding seeing "wide" horizontally squeezed 720x480. Or I might have been trying to say something else.

Or perhaps you were referring exclusively to my statement "I'll have high-quality sources later" that you quoted? What I'm referring to there is that I have several original-generation media produced by 4:3-only camcorders, which is much higher quality than VHS/Beta tapes. (Actually, those Beta tapes are SuperBeta HiFi tapes recorded on the finest videotape recorder I've ever owned: Sony's SL-HF900. Sony (over?) engineered the hell out of it, made back when they still used lots of metal and very little plastic (the thing's a tank). It's well over 20 years old, and it still functions perfectly, producing tapes with significantly higher quality than any VHS format. And the audio quality was so high, I often used it to record music only.) But I digress.

Maybe you're asking what my normal television source is? On all my wide-screen HDTVs, I watch DirecTV in "Wide Full" display mode. No side-bars, no letter-boxing, no "flat and short" visual distortion at all while watching DirecTV. Every other TV display mode zooms/magnifies whatever input I use; "Wide Full" is the only mode that doesn't enlarge and/or apparently modify the satellite signal. Since I never want to change out of that display mode, I needed to find the Enosoft solution I described above.

If I still haven't adequately addressed your question to your satisfaction, please rephrase the question...

[Cornucopia]

No, that still doesn't adequately address the questions.

What model TV do you have and what does the manual say about "Wide/Full" display mode?

Because you "can't have your cake and eat it, too!"
It's impossible to have both 4:3 AND 16:9 material to natively fit a single display. one or both will have to be adjusted.
That adjustment will either be shrink+pad, enlarge+crop, or non-linear stretching (which changes the AR of the material to non-normal proportions).

Yippie!! You've got 16:9 material the looks right on a 16:9 display. But that's not really ALL that you want, now is it?

Sounds like you've got 4:3 material from way back, but you've got a 16:9 display. Which one's gonna give. The "high fidelity purist" method would be to pillarbox. The "Best Buy Ass Clown" method would be to stretch... EVERYTHING.

Tell us what ALL your different sources are (media, format, expected display AR) and what displays you've got, and then you might get suggestions about what your real options are. But I would guess that most of them will require an adjustment of your expectations...

Scott

[edDV]

Right. All that Betamax, VHS and DirectTV 4:3 aspect material is supposed to display like this on a wide TV. Any horizontal stretching is altering the aspect ratio.

[ambushed19]

That's what I said, too!

Several points:

(1): The last post I read before I was forced to leave the forum immediately to address urgent personal matters was this one from edDV. After taking care of those urgent matters, I finally was able to return to my computer and read my emails and discovered that I had received quite a few "reply notices" from several boards where I had asked questions similar to my OP here in this thread. One of them was regarding yours, but nearly all the other replies came from different boards where I had asked similar questions, and all of them were considerably more comprehensible as well as more helpful than yours. Only jagabo's reference to Enosoft DV Processor yielded the fruit that led to my final solution.

(2): Note in particular that after describing the failure of my attempts so far in my OP, I wrote the following paragraph:

Or am I wrong about this? ... How can I produce widescreen 16:9 DVDs with maximum quality comparable to uncompressed DV quality, such that when I edit the captured video into separate clips (including editing out commercials and so forth), I don't get generational MPEG quality loss? [note that I also wanted the generation-zero DV files to contain properly proportioned 16:9 video without sidebars or letterboxing as well as being able to watch the resulting DVD without changing the widefull display mode of my widescreen HDTVs. That was the only mode that allowed me to watch everything from any input source without sidebars, stretching, or letterboxing; i.e., none of the other display modes met my requirements]

(3): When I eventually read your reply (which I only then discovered had been posted just a few minutes after edDV's post referenced above), I found it to be far, far too mind-bogglingly complex and confusing for me to understand what the hell you were saying, no matter how many times I re-read it! I am a near-newbie, after all. The most I could comprehend was that you appeared to be telling me with this paragraph:

1st - **CAPPING** You're capping from your VHS box, through you ADVC-55, through FIrewire to a DV capping software. ALL of them, I repeat ALL of them consider this a straight 1:1 transfer of raw data. Now, if this were a camera, I'd say that whatever the setting on the camera was (4:3 vs. 16:9) would be what was saved in the resulting DV file.

Since you're using a converter box, that choice moves from the camera to the box (IF you're given that option, if not then ALL of your caps are likely 4:3).

... was that there was probably no way at all to capture 4:3 source material into lossless, properly proportioned widescreen 16:9 DV files without sidebars or letterboxing in realtime!

Yet, it turned out that that part of your reply was simply incorrect! Why do I claim that? Because after a great deal of time, effort, and frustration, I determined that there is a way to do exactly that!. The proof being the solution I provided in my At long last, I've found an excellent realtime solution after all! post!

All that being the case, I cannot even conceive how you could claim, as you did:

That's what I said, too! ... Sounds like a PEBKAC error.

(By the way, I didn't appreciate your use of the phrases "PEBKAC error" or "Best Buy Ass Clown". I fail to see why such insults were necessary...)

Now that I have a perfect solution (as described in my "At long last, I've found an excellent realtime solution after all!" post) to my OP, I consider the issue closed and the debate utterly and completely resolved. I will not be returning to this thread again.

Thanks again to everyone who replied!

[jagabo]

The most I could comprehend was that you appeared to be telling me... there was probably no way at all to capture 4:3 source material into lossless, properly proportioned widescreen 16:9 DV files without sidebars or letterboxing in realtime!

Yet, it turned out that that part of your reply was simply incorrect!

Actually, he is correct. Either your source is already 16:9 in an NTSC frame, or you are flagging a 4:3 NTSC frame as 16:9, resulting in a distorted image when you play it back.

Others were skeptical because "anamorphic" 16:9 in an NTSC signal is somewhat unusual. That's why edDV was asking what your source was. For example, most HD cable boxes will letterbox 16:9 HD broadcasts into a 4:3 frame at the composite or s-video outputs. There are some though that produce anamorphic output. Old VHS tapes are most likely 4:3.

[Cornucopia]

I'm gonna reply to this, not because the OP "closed the thread" (or his mind), but because there may be others down the road that will have the same problem, and it needs to be fully addressed...

First, "PEBKAC" and "B.B.A.C" remarks: The 2nd one wasn't actually directed at you (not unless you WANT to include yourself in that group). Have you been to B.B.? Everytime, and I mean EVERYTIME I've been in that store a salesman wanting to "show off" HD displays is screwing up the setup and trying to stretch SD material (instead of using HD material or a decent A/B comparison with SD+pillarboxing). No lie. Hell, they even try to stretch 2.21:1 superwidescreen stuff by zooming in which crops the sides. Nothing pisses me off like a salesman, who in trying to push something, misrepresents it. I didn't say you did this. Actually, I never got an answer from my question about WHAT your display setting really meant...
AFA the 1st remark, YES, this was about you. But is that an insult? You started the thread by "blaming" all these applications for not working right (or the way you'd like). I demonstrated in a later post that they DO work right. You admitted yourself that you are a near-newby. Well, as a near-newby, then you should be more humble and realize that it's quite possible the reason that something didn't work right could have been because you didn't have some settings right, or that your assumptions on the supposed source format or destination format was faulty. Could happen. Could happen to me, and I've been doing this in a professional capacity for years...
Don't get so full of your "rightness" that you can't take some constructive criticism.

Second, your statement surmising that my remarks amounted to:

... was that there was probably no way at all to capture 4:3 source material into lossless, properly proportioned widescreen 16:9 DV files without sidebars or letterboxing in realtime!

, was not accurate. I didn't say that. What I said amounted to: whether your source is 4:3 or 16:9 (both in a 720x480 framesize), if your converter box has no means of ADJUSTING the AR flag, then the capping app would assume it's 4:3. Now, I would add one part to this: assuming you want to continue capping straight DV (without modification).
Of course, you can modify the flag if you use one of those apps I mentioned previously, as well as Enosoft's DV processor. However, you run the risk of saving a true 4:3 file with 16:9 flagging (which would squeeze everything flat and squat and add unnecessary letterboxing), or saving a true 16:9 file with 4:3 flagging (which would squeeze everything tall & thin and add unnecessary pillarboxing).
Enosoft's processor is no different here; it just adds capability to those apps that don't normatlly have them, plus it has the capability of passing the stream along in realtime to ANOTHER app. If the app you're using is the terminal app and it has that capability built-in, the Enosoft processor is superfluous (for that purpose at least).

My reply to that assertion would actually be that, surprisingly, your assumption that I might say that WAS CORRECT! Why?
Because just like it is impossible to fit a square peg in a round hole WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING, likewise it is impossible to fit 4:3 material into a 16:9 display WITHOUT changing something.
Maybe it's stretching (to a degree you yourself don't mind). Maybe it's pillarboxing. Maybe it's zooming+cropping top+bottom. Maybe it's a small combination of all those things to a degree that many might not mind. But it's still changing the source. It might EVEN be that your original assumption that this was 4:3 material was wrong and that you had 16:9 material (anamorphically squeezed), so applying the flag (that you SHOULD have applied anyway) did what you wanted of it. It's possible.
But there are ways to check for that.
Take your VHS tape, put it in a standard VHS player connected to a standard CRT SD TV. Does it play fullscreen without distortion? If so, it's 4:3. If it's with distortion, it's 16:9 anamorphic. If it's NOT fullscreen, but letterboxed already, run the tape in FF a little. and see if the letterboxing remains and is squiggly along with the picture. If it IS, that's because the black bars are PART of the picture. Meaning that your material is really 4:3, just that part of your signal is letterboxing.
There are ways to get rid of that and convert to anamorphic 16:9, but NONE of them are lossless. Your source material would have started with only 360 lines of "content" (not incl. letterboxing). An anamorphic DV or MPEG file starts with 480 lines of "content" and only displays 360 AFTER THE FACT at final playback. So you would have to be converting from 360->480 at some point, either when capping or when converting to MPEG. And this is NOT a lossless conversion, as you are creating missing material out of guesses. Doesn't matter the program, box, method, whatever. Some guesses are better, but NONE are infinitely, perfectly close to the intended.

Lastly, jargon & comprehensibility: Well, after having just taught about 150 students how to do their 1st time video shoots/edits and having passed all but one (who didn't show for his final), with glowing reports from the students, I feel justified in saying that there is a place for jargon in this forum and anybody who intends to further their understanding of multimedia should start soaking up the jargon and asking what they all mean, without arrogance, annoyance or avoidance. And, while I am certainly WINDY at times (such as this), I'm usually very good at being comprehendible to newbies. Especially when they WANT to learn. I'm happy to expound further, to clarify or enhance. It sounded to me like you were just impatient for the quick solution to this ONE problem you seemed to have right now and didn't want to hear about the big picture of HOW TO SOLVE MANY PROBLEMS THAT MAY/WILL ARISE. So be it.

Scott