720 X 480 or 640 X 480?

L_Town wrote on 8/14/2009, 11:47 AM
I having trouble deciding what to set my export settings as. I will be creating a WMV file out of Vegas 7. My original project properties are set to NTSC DV 720 X 480. My footage is NTSC DV 720 X 480.

Within my project I have included various pictures and text. One scene contains 9 pictures that are all equal in size (I think they are 240 X 160). These 9 photos are all on the screen at the same time, thus filling the canvas. These photos are 1.0 pixel aspect ratio. I also did some chroma keying in another scene for some green screen effects.

My WMV file will not be displayed on the web and will be either played from Windows Media Player or played from within a MS PowerPoint Presentation.

Should I export as 640 X 480 square pixels at 30fps or 720 X 480 square pixels at 30fps?

I tried 640 X 480 but not having good results with my 9 pictures scene...

Comments

PerroneFord wrote on 8/14/2009, 11:59 AM
Export at 720x480.
Chienworks wrote on 8/14/2009, 12:03 PM
Is your project widescreen or "4:3"? I'm guessing it's 4:3 or you wouldn't be asking about 640x480 as a possibility.

720x480 is the number if pixels in the frame, but it doesn't represent the shape of the frame. In 4:3 the pixels are 0.9091 times as wide as they are tall so that shrinks the image horizontally slightly. Multiply 720 x 0.9091 and you get just about 655, which is how wide the image would be if square pixels were used. If you're not going for DVD or broadcast standards then i'd suggest 656x480 since this is the closest multiple of 8 to 655, and WMV frame sizes have to be multiples of 4 or 8.

On the other hand, if you want to fill a standard 4:3 computer screen exactly then render to 640x480 and adjust your video and images to fit that shape, which is about 15 pixels narrower than the DV video frame. This means that the video will either leave narrow black bars on top and bottom, or you can crop the sides to make it fit, or you can stretch it to fit. I'd choose the middle option since the sides of the frame generally are rough or blank anyway.

Now, for your pictures ... i'm guessing you divided 480 by 3 to get 160, and 720 by 3 to get 240. This was probably a mistake. Pictures generally use square pixels and the DV frame would be 655 (actually 654.54545454...) wide if it used square pixels. Divide this by 3 and you get 218 or so. Your pictures should be 218x160 to make them fit the frame almost perfectly. Maybe this would have helped your other thread about picture sizes too.
L_Town wrote on 8/14/2009, 1:30 PM
Thanks Chienworks! I will try this out next week when I come back to this project.