Chewtobacca said:
Thanks for your explanation, DE. I'm still a little in the dark though. :-) (Sorry to talk about this in your thread.)
These black bars are designed for old non-HDTVs that overscan, are they?
I think so, yeah - I think it was there to give the TV time to get from the end of line to the beginning of the next. It was kept when everything went digital, but now that resolutions have changed, it's no longer a consideration with HD.
If you view many DVDs on your widescreen television on exact scan (or just scan, whatever the manufacturer calls 1:1) you can see the black bars. Would your TV be functioning as a square pixel display in this case, or is it just monitors?
TV pixels are never square, whether you account for NAB or are working in PAL, NTSC, anamorphic or not... I don't know why TVs offer "exact scan", because overscan (unrelated to NAB) dictates that around 5% of the picture around the edges should be considered "unsafe", and professional TV is produced with this in mind (including HD).
I was just taking snapshots of my sources into photoshop, measuring the pixels of visible image, calculating the aspect ratio accordingly and resizing. I take it I did right?
Pretty much - I'm not sure why it was 7 instead of 8, but that's close enough.
I am sorry to be a massive pain in the neck, but this is a new thing to me. Can you explain exactly what you did with the Death Star footage?
I was previewing everything with an AviSynth script that resized the video so it was displayed at the correct aspect ratio and I realised the Death Star didn't have a circular outline, so I've just stretched it up (or squished it in sideways) to compensate. I think it looks a lot nicer like that.
DE