I have decided to create this as a new posting because I have had so many off line requests AND there are so many postings hidden away in the maze of questions and answers here that it needs to be up front for a while.

Firstly if you have a mental blockage over the fact that TV is in lines and pictures are in pixels and there is not relationship between them, then do not read any further, continue to get it wrong.

What follows applies to menue backgrounds and to mpeg streams using stills in a production. I use VideoPack 4 for interactive menues and have no experience with Adaptec.

Here is a process that will ensure your circles are circles and your images are not compressed or stretched when VIEWED ON A TV OR ON A COMPUTER AT FULL SCREEN from a VCD formated CD or from tape. In any other mode than full screen the circles will not be circles because you cannot have it both ways. Media Player is a prime example of software not playing full screen and therefore not giving correct aspect ratio pictures as will be seen on the TV.

Like it not, WE VIEW OUR PRODUCTIONS ON 4:3 TV'S OR COMPUTERS and the simple answer to the problem is the following:

USE 4:3 ASPECT RATIO IMAGES and let the computer or DVD player do the juggle between pixels and lines to produce the picture.

So for PAL use pictures that are processed at 768 x 576. In NTSC use pictures that are 640 x 480.

If your doing 16:9 then in PAL its 1024 x 576, in NTSC 853 x 480.

VideoPack 4 will process jpeg images, I do not know if adaptec does, so it may be a BMP that is required for that case.

If you want to do the pixel to line process as well, then in NTSC you save your picture not in 640 x 480 but as a 720 x 480 - you stretch the pixels sideways. In PAL you compress the picture to 720 x 576 and both those formats are not in the 4:3 aspect ratio but the DVD player expands or compresses the image to the correct 4:3 aspect ratio for viewing on the TV.

I have found that it is not always necessary to do the resize but in NLE based programes like Premiere it is better to get the sizes correct so if your using digital video at 720 x 576 in Pal or 720 x 480 in NTSC I would do the same for the stills - I REPEAT, start with 4:3 aspect ratio stills and expand or squeeze the horizontals to suit the video system your using.

I have produced hundreds and hundreds of images in video presentations and I do like to see circles as circles when they are viewed on the TV this method ensures that. I have also produced NTSC streams based on stills using this process and the circles are circles.

Use a circular object as a picture and check it out.

If your scanning images from photographs scan the normal 6 x 4 photograph at least at 300dpi and then in the processing make them the sizes mentioned above. If your using 10 x 8's you can drop the scan size, or if your starting from a very small picture then go higher. For example I scan color slides at 1200dpi and they are excellent on the TV from a mpeg stream as well. Super from tape.

FINALLY start with stills that are larger than the frame sizes quoted here NEVER use originals that are smaller and therefore require expanding up, that will kill the quality straight away, the source size has got to be correct to get quality.

When I do a mixed presentation of stills and video it opens with STILLS because they are of better quality than motion video and first impressions are often how you remember the production.

Thank you to all of those who made cntact off line, please accept this as a reply to your email.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 07, 2000

Answers

One email that I received said that in the NTSC format compressed verticals on the TV screen or at full screen on the computer occurred and I did not answer that in the posting above. So here is the answer:

If you actually use an original picture that is based on the 720 x 480 size and it has every thing in proportion, ie circles are circles and not elipses then when the DVD player compresses the 720 wide NTSC information to the 640 wide size compressed verticals result. The reverse happens in PAL because the dvd player takes the 720 wide information and makes it 768 hence the expansion in the viewed result.

My impression is that PAL provides a better end result than NTSC because PAL compresses and NTSC expands the data in the final process, in picture processing that has always been a no no!

None of this occured in analogue editing.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 07, 2000.

Thank you Ross, your message is very informative and helpfull. Tonight, I will try to create a vcd using your guidelines and let you know.

Thanks again.

-- Esskay (Esskay@abc.net), February 08, 2000.

A video slide show produced in Adobe Premiere for a VCD will be quite up market if you also use sub-titles with the slides. You can either sub title each picture individually or superimpose the title using premiere (fade up fade down for example). The later option allows you to retain the picture in its untitled form.

The same rules for selecting the title size apply as described above, if you produce them in 768 x 576 PAL or 640 x 480 NTSC the title font will be correct when displayed on the TV or full screen on the computer.

Premiere titles actually allow you to work in any size and often producing the title at quarter size is sufficient.

You can stretch or compress the font by simply changing the title window size in Premiere. If you use the digital sizes then in PAL the font will be stretched and in NTSC the font will be compressed.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 13, 2000.