which PAR/res for S-video out in Premiere Pro and conversions

17th Sep 2012 13:54 #1

Member

Hello all, this isa LONG question.

I am a bit confused about proper conversion PAR/resolution. I know what is square pixel and 0.9 pixel use din NTSC, I know what is an aspect ratio (4:3) etc.

We run a small community TV station. We use Deejaysistem Video for playout and the video output is via Nvidia Geforce 9500, which has a DVI/VGA and a S-video out, however s-video is some special S-Video jack that can run component (blue red green) or composite (connecting yellow video cable into a blue component cable connected to this special S-video jack). This means I can connect via this special SVideo jack as component and I have same quality output as VGA, or I can connect composite cable to a blue component output cable on s-video jack and have s-video/composite video quality. Right now, we use composite video output form the computer.

If it was for a playout over VGA into a LCD TV which both use square pixels, I would have no question. But the output is over Geforce Component-to-composite adapter (NVidia GeForce adapter cable) and then goes into a fiber optic transmitter going to cable company. At cable company the signal is amplified and split into analogue and digital cable, in analogue cable a regular analogue modulator (Blonder Tongue) is used, on digital cable the signal is entered into MPEG-2 encoder.

My question comes in this:

What should be my video conversion/editing settings for this? For video conversion from AVI/MPEG-2 into H264. Also editing settings in Premiere Pro.

Should I output/convert into as square or non-square pixels? E.G. should I use 1.5 or 1.33 ratio for 4:3 aspect ratio on output? Deejaysystem Video takes everything at square pixel, meaning if I output a file as 640x480 and play it out, it gives a perfect 4:3 output on the DeejaySystem Video preview screen. If I output/convert into 720x480, it creates a smaller picture and adds black bars on the bottom (basically making it a slightly widescreen video with black bar compensation).

To make this an even more complicated, Geforce was using VGA screen size in WinXP for secondary screen output (1024x768) now under Win7 GeForce allows only 720x480 output (actually running at around 704x472 because the picture was getting too much outside of visible area on analogue cable.

If I used a DVD for playout, I know it would output with 0.9 PAR, so 720x480 would be quite appropriate, and also conversion into non-square pixels. SO, EXPERTS..... what PAR and resolution should I use for conversion and Premiere Pro*, when outputting via NVidia Geforce, using a) S-video/composite, b) component, 3) VGA ...what PAR do video cards use? square pix? Nonsquare pix? Doe sit matter whether it's vcard out via svideo or VGA?

*Premiere Pro uses NTSC DV work area, with 720x480 and 0.9 PAR (unless specified as Custom, with square pixels)

So far, I have been converting to 640x480 square pixels but large portions of pic was getting outside of visible area on older analogue TV's (regardless of whether those TVs were connected to analogue o digital cable), connecting a USB TV box got more-or-less full scale pic within the frame.