Please help - TV cuts off 10% of the left and right side of

[marquard]

Anyone has some guidelines for creating a VCD or SVCD, so "what you see is what you get" on the TV screen? I.e. how many pixels in each side should I expect to be cut? How can I transform the picture, if I wish to ensure to keep the full picture on my TV set?

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On 2001-04-25 20:32:58, paulbanker wrote:
Hello all, I am new here but have a problem.

I have burned a movie as NTSCFilm (the format doesnt really matter i'm having problems with PAL as well) and when I play the burned VCD in my comptuer it works fine. However, when i put the CD into my napa cd/vcd/mp3 player and hook it up to my television, a good part of the movie gets left off of the screen. You can see what i mean on the picture below.

If anyone could help i would *GREALTY* apprecaite it!


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[Chopper Face]

I get the same problem with some anime. People who encode and sub some stuff don't always take into account that it might end up on someone's TV. Usually it's minor with things only occasionally having a character go off the side but I guess if it's really bad (subs off the bottom) then you could always somehow pad the sides of the screen or something. Not even sure how one would pull this off.

I was doing some subs myself and I had done a test of it. Some guy told me the subs were cut off on his dreamcast so I just bumped them up a bit. So you could also mention it to whoever's making your source material.

I guess when you make video you have to think "inside the box".

[marquard]

This is my original frame!


This is the result when showed in the Nintaus N9901 DVD player! Happens both for VCD and SVCDs!




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marquard on 2001-07-13 06:06:45 ]</font>

[TIbrO]

Yes, I noticed this with the episodes of Dragonball GT at Super5.com and the subtitles on those. They just go off the sides and bottom! I emailed the dudes there, and asked them why this was, and they said I wasn't supposed to make VCDs of their clips, and that they were intended to be viewed on a PC in Media Player, which would display the entire video.

As I've used Premiere more and more, when I made watermarks for certain tapes of mine, I noticed that Premiere actually has the exact borders in their [Sub]Title Maker. The interface resembles the crosshairs of a sniper rifle (too much Counter-Strike), with a centerpoint, and then dotted lines a certain percent indented from all sides and top and bottom. I loaded up a music video, and the music video's title and artist info, as well as the MTV2 watermark were all perfectly aligned to Premiere's cross hairs and margins. So if you're working with NTSC or PAL output, Premiere is a good way to find out what is going to be cropped off by the TVs.

[Chopper Face]

I guess it's kind of tricky when trying to pull of a slideshow or something with a clear border like you've got. I guess the only suggestion I could give is to leave some sort of black space around or design your picture so that what ends up at the edges of the screen is not essential. You never really see anything on TV which has an outside border like that since it really wouldn't work the same for everyone.

[TIbrO]

Using that picture frame border is a good idea, though... this way you get the entire picture on the screen, so just the picture frame gets cropped. And the picture is the most important part, anyway, right?

FYI, it depends on the player because origionally I used the NAPA 311 and it screwed up like I showed everyone w/ the Matrix picture above, but I bought a sweet Esonic VCD player (with a screen on it etc its nice) and it works fine.

So it all depends on the player.

[Chopper Face]

Yeah I kind of noticed that too. My DVD player seems to cut off more than my LD player does. Thought it might be my imagination though. Wierd.

[kriskim]

i remember covering this way back in gr11 physics (we were trying to determine the speed of light using ghost images on tvs). anyways, the reason there's cut off on left/right is because all tvs have something called "horizontal overscan". the manufacturer can not guarantee that the electrons in the gun will go all the way to the edges, so they instead make it go further (in our physics calculations, we considered it 10% overscan) to give themselves sort of a buffer.

[vitualis]

The demo VCD on download from the VCDImager site contains some TV test screens that allows you to measure the amount that your TV+DVD player is cropping off the edges. There are screens that allow you to measure in pixels (hi-res and low res) and percentage.

For example, using the test screen, I've worked out that my TV+VCD player crops about 4% off the top and a little bit less than 4% on the other sides. However, at the top corners, almost 8% is lost.

Regards.

[TIbrO]

I just had to compare earlier today and I noticed something, which I learned I had subconciously known all along from years of watching TV. On my dad's TV downstairs is a 27 inch Sony Trinitron that we got back in 1995. The screen on it is flat, and not curved. The display on that is not as bad as my brother's TV, which has a curved screen, like most older TVs did, and it even crops out some of the watermarks on channels, and the music video info on MTV. So it all depends on your playback device, the way you encode it, and the TV's screen and how that TV works exactly.

The VCD player paulbanker described sounds like a portable one, no? Perhaps the portable ones, since all they are made for is playing VCDs, display the exact full picture that you're supposed to see, and since it is portable, it certainly doesn't work like a TV. His probably has an LCD screen or something. Not to mention that on one of those portable players, the signal is never converted to analog until it fonally displays on the screen and the light has to make it to your eye.