Black Vertical bars in P2 720/24p project exporting to SD DVD

A

asflyboy

Member
The footage for this project was shot on an HVX 200 at 720 24p (960x720 native in Premiere). I'm using Premiere CS4. When exporting through media encoder to an MPEG2-DVD and using the "NTSC Progressive Widescreen High Quality" preset I get vertical black bars left and right that are about 10 pixels wide. Output in media encoder is of course 720x480.

There must be a work around for this. I can export the same project to Blu-Ray and it looks fine. I just want a standard def DVD as well.

Maybe I can export it as uncompressed Quicktime and change the dimensions manually because of the square pixels. Any ideas?
 
I mean output PAR not the source PAR. 720 x 480 has to be ether 1.2 (widescreen) or .9 (fullscreen) to be NTSC compliant. If your PAR is wrong then you'll see black bars.
 
I'm dealing with this very issue at the moment. I have P2 footage that I'm exporting from Adobe Premiere CS3 as a MPEG-2 16:9 footage and it looks fine when I play it in VideoLAN or Encore (when I'm making the actual DVD). However, my 1440x1080 HDV source footage, exported exactly the same way, has the small bars on either side of the picture. I don't want this and find it highly annoying (and I know it's not just VLC, because if I export it as an H.264 and then upload to Vimeo, I get the same black bars).
 
Create a new SD 16:9 sequence, drop your HDV 1080p sequence in, scale it down then render to SD and it will work.
 
HD isn't as wide as SD 16:9, so the black bars on the sides are normal. The only thing you can do is zoom in a little. Best done on an SD timeline.
 
Huy Vu said:
I mean output PAR not the source PAR. 720 x 480 has to be ether 1.2 (widescreen) or .9 (fullscreen) to be NTSC compliant. If your PAR is wrong then you'll see black bars.
Click to expand...

The output PAR when I bring the .m2v file into Encore is 1.0 (square pixels). It shows up as 1.0 whether I export from a DVCPRO HD 720/24p sequence or the same source P2 footage from a DV 24p sequence. Narrow black bars from the 720 24p output and no black bars from the DV output.

Of course I am selecting 16:9 in media encoder. It defaults to 16:9 in the "NTSC Progressive Widescreen High Quality" preset.
 
David Jimerson said:
HD isn't as wide as SD 16:9, so the black bars on the sides are normal. The only thing you can do is zoom in a little. Best done on an SD timeline.
Click to expand...

David,

I think this is the solution. When I bring the DVCPRO HD 720/24p footage into a DV sequence and zoom in, voila, no black bars on export.

The black bars are really not that big of a deal on the DVD media I was using. The bars were very narrow and outside of the safe area and didn't show up when the DVD was played on a TV set anyway.

Thanks for the suggestion.
 
asflyboy said:
The output PAR when I bring the .m2v file into Encore is 1.0 (square pixels). It shows up as 1.0 whether I export from a DVCPRO HD 720/24p sequence or the same source P2 footage from a DV 24p sequence. Narrow black bars from the 720 24p output and no black bars from the DV output.
.
Click to expand...

It shouldn't be 1, that's not NTSC compliant. If it's widescreen it needs to be 720x480 1.2 PAR. Set it to that, don't rely on the preset.
 
I'm a Final Cut guy who's working with Premiere/media encoder for a new job.

I'm curious, to why I've never run into this issue when compressing HD footage to SD-DVD with either compressor or Telestream's episode. What are those programs doing differently that media encoder can't/won't do?
 
Well, there are several possibilities.

First, there's the possibility that it comes out the same way with FCP, but you just never noticed. :) Given TV overscan, and also that most software players have a black background which would hide the bars, this is very possible.

It's also possible that those programs do some kind of automatic zoom, or stretch the footage slightly horizontally. The math is the math, and SD 16:9 is slightly wider, so if the black bars aren't there, one of those two things must happen.
 
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