Final Cut Express HD and Toast 7 - DV-L

Message from discussion Final Cut Express HD and Toast 7

kyakoub...@adelphia.net

More options May 1, 6:56 pm

From: <kyakoub...@adelphia.net>

Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 15:56:13 -0700

Local: Thurs, May 1 2008 6:56 pm

Subject: Re: Final Cut Express HD and Toast 7

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---- Randy Quimpo <randy.qui...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My experience with Toast is that it makes reasonable disks that play most of
> the time (actually, it never failed me). Only thing I watch out for is the
> recording media - some dont play well (or dont play at all) on some decks.

> Recently, I had a problem burning a DVD (using DVDSP, Toast 6) because it
> was not rendering still frames (in the menu) properly. I actually asked for
> some advice on this list, because I could not imagine what was wrong since
> the stills (and menu that gave me problems) were actually PART OF DVDSP
> package. After lots of testing, I realized that the problem was my TV/DVD
> player combo - just like you, the DVD I burned played fine on the Mac. I
> found this out when i played a commercial DVD in it and it was exhibiting
> the same problem I had with the disk I just burned.

> Moral of the story? This DVD thing is really funny, and once in a while you
> may run into a player/TV combo that simply acts wierd. My suggestion (which
> is something I am implementing myself) is to buy a portable DVD player and
> make sure your demo reels run on THAT. I will probably buy one myself next
> week for presentations (yep, just like you).

Randy daaaahhhhhling, thanks sooo much for the feedback. Okay, enough Katherine Hepburn.

Thing is, that skipping happens on one of my regular DVD players at home, too. On my second, it plays fine. The screen still looks too wide, but I think I just forgot a simple lesson in video display: a simple thing known as "overscan". Duh. I believe moving the bugs in more will fix that problem, but the skipping must be alleviated. I'm not sure where to even start troubleshooting that, unless it's a matter of the software I'm using to burn the discs, in which case maybe I'll need to give iDVD a try?? Any thoughts on that?

Also, I noticed something when experimenting today. All of my projects are 720 x 480 in FCE. For the footage that's 16:9, I usually just allow for horizontal black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, scaling the wide footage down (actually, FCE seems to do that automatically). But I wanted to see what would happen if I used a single 16:9 movie file that just went directly into Toast, sans the SD screen space of FCE and output QT movie file from there.

I got a huge screen! Okay, in more accurate terms, on my Mac the video filled the space of my widescreen Dell monitor with no distortion. On one of my home DVD players, where I can adjust the aspect ratio, the DVD played back compressed horizontally. I stretched it out to 16:9 in my display options, and it filled the HD TV cleanly.

Now I know I did not render an HD DVD. Neither the disc nor the burner are capable of that. Can someone explain this to me? I've noticed this with professional DVDs as well. They're SD discs, but they play well and look good when I stretch them out to 16:9 (after, of course, I've noticed that the screen appeared horizontally compressed at 4:3).

Thanks for humoring me,

Keith

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