"True HD" on DVD?

A

Act2action

New member
I apoligise in advanced if this has already been answered ad nausea:

I have a six minute film shot in HD, however when I put it out to DVD discs I had to literally shrink the video in Final Cut so that the sides would not be cut off for regular TV sets. On projectors you can see that the video is really just a rectangle floating in the middle of the screen (I mean you can see off the sides, and that I shrunk it). My questions are:

1. Can I leave it in HD format and will SD TV's automatically shrink it down to a widescreen format, while HD monitors expand it to its full size (being that its the same aspect ratio)... like the professional films do or HDTV does?

2. Do you have to buy special blank HD DVD discs in order to get the benefits of the HD?

Thanks,
c j l m
 
Maybe you´ve shrink too much. TV sets are using overscan, which means that you see approx. 80 percents from your video frame, 10 percent of each side is "hidden" behind TV-s physical borders. So little "cut off" is normal. Projector however shows nearly 100 percent of video frame.

Sure you can buy blank HD-DVD discs but then you need HD-DVD burner and HD-DVD player. There are some models of SD-DVD players wich are "HD capable" and can play back HD material burnt to normal DVD blank.
 
DVD players cannot play high def. You have to convert your footage to standard-def before you can put it on DVD.

If you author as a 16:9 DVD you should be able to fit your full frame, although it'll be shrunk down to 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL).
 
You can get standard DVD players that play back HD WMV video - they are all a little non-standard and tend to be targeted at business not consumers.
 
If you really want to deliver HD material on DVD discs, you should just burn WM9 HD .. or quicktime H.264 files to a DVD in the DVD-ROM format suitable only for playback on computers (in other words, do not make a DVD video disc.. just burn the file(s) to a DVD-R). I would be hard pressed to find somone that had an HD TV that does not have a computer, but there are alot of people that do not have an Hd TV that DO have a computer. so as far as viewing HD content. delivering it for viewing on a computer is going to be the best way to give everyone access to it. those people that have nice HD sets can still output it from there to thier HDTV if they want anyway.

but as barry said, if you want to make regular DVD Video discs, it has to be SD 720 x 480. using a 1.2 pixel aspect will keep your widescreen materials intact.


something that ive been doing for little projects is making a regularSD DVD-video disc with a regular menu and such, and then also including DVD-rom files on the same disc that are accessable in a computer DVD rom drive that include an WM9 / H.264 / Flash full HD version of the same project.
what may or may not be an issue for you with doing this is that people can copy the full HD content from the disc.
 
There are a few special DVD players that will also play back some high-def formats, but that's not a regular DVD and it's incompatible with about 99% of the DVD players out there.

So if you're looking for something for your own closed-shop purposes, yes you can get something like the Avel LinkPlayer and play high-def DVDs on that. But if you're looking for something for mass distribution to end customers, just understand that the DVD player your customer owns will not play anything other than a regular standard-def DVD.
 
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