Black edges with NTSC and PAL

I'm learning how to make videos in SL and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Okay, this must be a very n00b question:

I've captured a scene with Fraps and edited it in Vegas. When I use the NTSC format, I see black edges/borders at the left and right in the preview window and also when rendered to Quicktime. When I use PAL I see black edges at the top and bottom of the screen.

I've used Torley's tuts and settings in the Wiki, but I can't get rid of these black borders. However, when I import and use a jpg-picture in Vegas, the edges are all gone as long as the picture shows. But with the captured footage from Fraps, the borders are back again.

What am I doing wrong?

What's your screen's aspect ratio and what's the ratio of the formatted/converted file ?

If you have a 4:3 screen and try to save/convert the file as a 16:9 you very often get those results. Also the other way round..if you have a 16:9 (also 16:10) TFT screen and try to capture,convert and/or save in a 4:3 ratio you also get often such ill results.

In Vegas, use the icon to the right of the Save (floppy disc) icon, called Properties, there you can adjust the settings for height, width and pixel size.. all having an effect on what is seen in the output media. Now go to each scene section, right click and choose Pan/Zoom, uncheck both 'Centered' and Aspect, then drag both height and width of the viewing frame so that your media fits snuggly inside. Do that for every scene, and you will not see anymore black bars. Once you have set that pan/crop window, you can lock aspect ratio again and move the window around

If you capture at the same size/aspect ratio, you can save the Pan/Crop selection as a template, use it over and over...

Checkout the 'How To' function, it will explain a lot.

Hi Gunther and AWM. Hm, I find it a bit confusing to be honest.

- My screen's resolution is 1280 x 1024 pixels.
- SL's resolution is 1280 x 974. I am running SL windowed, but fullscreen. Btw, Torley advise is: set Second Life screen resolution to 1024x768. I overlooked that.
- In Fraps I checked the option Full-size.
- In Vegas I start a project with the default NTSC settings, see picture:



- After that I render the video, using Torleys settings:

Render vid to "QuickTime 7" with these settings:
Project tab:
Video rendering quality: Best
Video tab:
Frame size: 640x480 (square pixel, meant to be played back on computer screens)
Frame rate: 20
Field order: None (progressive scan)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.000
Video format: Photo - JPEG
Compressed depth: 24 bpp color
Quality: 95% (near lossless)
Audio tab:
"Include audio" checked
Audio format: Uncompressed
Sample rate (Hz): 44,100
Bit depth: 16
Channels: Stereo
Streaming:
"Prepare for streaming" checked
Optimization: Fast Start

These settings come from Torleys page in the Wiki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Torley_Linden/Vidtut_process

I can see there's a lot of difference in resolutions/pixels. What would be the best setup?

Glad we got some templates sorted for you... noticed you had framerate set at 20 in preferences, but output at NTSC 29.970, always match them together with the capture framerate (i.e. what you set in fraps etc).

Good luck, if you need anything else, just post here, or IM me ingame

Look forward to seeing your work on the forums.

Oh Mars, I am well on my way! First I want to thank you very very much for helping me set all those complicated programs up. Thanks for your time and patience!

I've played around a bit more with the settings in each program and have now the perfect templates for various functions for my pc. I've written them all down and will post them here later for other people to see and perhaps learn. By the way, I've found out that somehow a pixel aspect ratio of just 1,0000 (square) works best for me in Vegas and later in the conversion process. I don't know why, because (like you said) these are not 'round' pixels, but they give me a sharper image in the end somehow.

At the moment I am finishing the intro and first scenes for my video, and oh boy am I proud already! I still have a huge load of work to do, but the start (with your templates) is perfect and it's just so much fun to do. I don't know how the video will turn out in the end. It will be about 2,5 minutes long and I hope it will look a bit like the movie that I have in my head. Nothing fancy, just a simple introduction movie for my shop.

More to come. Thanks again!!

You are very welcome.
Using templates that you create that suits the way you work, aids the workflow, removing much of the repeditive techie stuff, releasing you to be creative.

I look forward to seeing some of your work posted here

You might want to change the field order to progressive, otherwise you'll get horizontal bars from the NTSC interlacing.

NTSC is really only meant to be used if you are going to output the video for TV viewing, for digital video avoid interlacing and use square pixels (you've already figured that).

You can improve performance too if you go for 25fps - that's 5 less frames per second that you have to capture.

To be accurate, digital films usually use 24fps, but 25 is convenient if you are using WMM as that only lets you edit at 25 or 30 (at least in XP WMM, there are a lot more options if you use WME).

25fps is also handy for UK just in case you ever want to put it on a DVD for TV viewing as UK TV (PAL) is 25fps. US is that weird 29.97 fps, or near enough 30.

Torley's settings are pretty good for the output, but for consistency, if you want to use them, use the same properties for the project.