Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

In that case you'll be fine - Spruce can do 4:3 letterbox, I did one this way last month - it worked fine.

I design with square pixels too... I used the PAL pixel width when I did my calculations - doh ! Told you this stuff made my brain hurt :-) I've edited the first post with what I hope are the right values, now ! Sorry for the confusion... my excuse is I'm a PAL person :-)

Ian

Hi Michael,

Do you mean how to scale the highlights for 4:3 letterbox display ? If so, then here is what has worked for me:

- Design at 864x480
- Scale to 720x356 then enlarge canvas size to 720x480 for 4:3 letterbox
- Shift by a pixel or two depending on the authoring app !

Because of your need to specify your crop to 480 manually in CCE, you are designing at a ratio of 1.7777... whereas mine is 1.8. I have to admit this stuff always makes my brain hurt, but we should be able to figure out the right numbers for you.

I always find it helps to do it in stages, imagining that DVDs had square pixels ( if only ! ) In which case you would first need to scale the horizontal dimension from 960 to 640, ie. a factor of 1.5. So, this would mean scaling first to 640x360. But, then it would need scaling horizontally to 720 because of the non-square pixels, so you can just do both in 1 stage. Then you need to enlarge the canvas size vertically to 486, and finally do your crop.

So if I'm right, your 3 stages would be:

- Design at 960x540
- Scale to 720x360, enlarge canvas to 720x486
- Crop as per CCE to 480

But I've been wrong before about this stuff !

Cheers,

Ian

PS. Why not design at 864x486 ? That way your wide designs don't need any vertical scaling which will give you a tiny theoretical increase in quality...!