Add bars or not?

[USLatin]

I am finishing up a slide-show where some of the pictures are "taller" than the height I selected on my "pan/crops". I rendered a MainConcept mp4 and it looked like I will need to add black bars on the top and bottom as I've seen mentioned here before. However, I rendered a windows media version and the excess portions are not there. Is that due to the way the windows player displays or the render itself left the extra portions out? I guess it is the render because resolutions are different. The windows media preset of 720x 480 so that's a 1.5 and the mp4 is 320 x 240 so 1.33333.

I am worried because because I might have to burn a DVD instead of hooking up the projector to my Laptop which is what I would have rather done. If I have to burn a DVD, can I burn a NTSC WMV? I couldn't find how, and "windows" sounds like its just for computers... I am worried about resolution. I know I can render an MPEG-2, but would I select DVD as an output? Sounds only logical. Then I would select interlaced but bottom or top first? No difference right? And lastly, should I play with the Video Quality or the Bitrate? Or both? Or maybe MPEG-2 was not what you guys wanted to recommend to me anyway. Is it?

 

[David Jimerson]

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking about the cropping height and render settings.

Work in a project which has the aspect ratio you want (widescreen or 4:3). Then, for any photo which doesn't fit, go into pan/crop, right-click the image, and select "Match Output Ratio." You should then have what you want, even if you have to slide the "F" window around to get the exact position on the picture you want.

Be careful, though, about rendering WMVs or Quicktimes which are a different aspect ratio than your project. You may find things like overlay graphics aren't quite where you thought they might be.

As for DVD, use the DVD Architect templates under MPEG-2, and don't change anything. If it's a 24p timeline you're working on, choose the 24p DVD options.

You would never want to render as WMV (or H.264 or MPEG-4) for DVD, because it's highly-compressed, and being recompressed into MPEG-2 for the DVD would make a big mess of it. You wouldn't be happy with the quality.