I use FCE to create demo reels to showcase my 3D animation and VFX shots. For the longest time I was using FCE 1.0 for my simple edits. When I liked my composition, I'd then output a Final Cut movie. That would be brought into Toast 7, which made me a nice DVD from it. Not so anymore.

I recently upgraded to FCE HD, v3.5. My menu options now are Quicktime Movie and Using QT Conversion. I don't know what that means, so I went with Quicktime Movie. Brought this into Toast 7 and burned a DVD. Said DVD played nicely on my Mac.

This morning's interview tho was a different story. On their TV/DVD combo guy, the sides of my movie were cut off to some extent (maybe 50 pixels on each side? not sure exactly, but company bugs were now half visible) and the DVD skipped repeatedly throughout the playback. It wasn't so bad that it was unwatchable, but it was noticeable.

Do any of you have any ideas what might be wrong? I've got to fix this or else showcasing my work to prospective clients/employers is going to be a problem. And that can not be.

Thanks much,

Keith

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).

rgds /RandyQ

http://www.q2digitalstudio.com

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

I'm on a PC here, so can't help specificially, but 2 things that you
can look into.

For the skipping disks, you may have created a disk with a bit rate
that was too high for the player. In TMPGEnc (a well known MPEG
encoder for the PCs) there is a check box to limit bitrate to 8000. I
always check that. I figure if they took the time to put that there,
there must be a reason! I'm thinking that is probably the limit of
most DVD players.

Also in TMPGEnce, there is a place to set the aspect ratio of my clip,
on a clip by clip basis. First I tell it that my 720x480 clip is
either 4x3 or 16x9 (or PAL flavors, etc). Then on the next screen, I
tell it what aspect ratio the DVD will be. Typically these should
match, so 16x9 all the way through. That sets the Aspect Ratio flag,
which the DVD player will read.

Then we're back to the DVD player. In the DVD menu settings, the user
can set the player to respond to the various flavors of DVDs. For
example, you can tell the player you have a 4x3 TV, and that you want
to watch your 16x9 movies as letter box, or you want to center crop
(chop off the edges). And vice versa. Some DVD players will stretch
4x3 to 16x9 on a wide screen TV. All of this is out of our control
when we author the DVD.

You didn't say, but I'm guessing by your description that the TV/DVD
combo was 4x3, your disk was 16x9, and the edges were cropped off,
Center Crop as above. Since its a Combo unit, it likely knew it was
only 4x3! You probably didn't want to be messing with the guys
TV menus right?

Hopefully you can pull a nugget out of this that you can translate
into your own software.

I'm all for the idea of bringing along a portable unit. I haven't
bought one yet, but am always thinking I should. About twice a year
I'll take a DVD for a demo and run into something like this as well.

And, if you do look for a portable DVD, look for one that you can also
use as a little monitor. Some (most?) of them have a A/V in / out
port, so you could play the disk on your portable, and send the video
and audio out to the customers TV, OR you could use that nice little
screen as a monitor for your video camera once in a while. I've seen
some models that would do that, and some that wouldn't, so read
carefully!

Carlin

Carlin Comm
http://www.seattle-hotshotz.com
206-283-2176
Seattle, WA 98119