pt.2 of 2...
The goal of this 2 part article is to hopeful illustrate a few things you can do to work through some of the common issues we face as promotions editors & designers. While not all of it is presented in a step by step fashion, useful links are provided to fill in the holes where necessary. This information is not without fault. It comes from years of trial and error and error and error. I know people like to call that experience, but I don't. So with that said, I hope you find it useful and entertaining. Enjoy.

Step 3: Knowing your dimensions

As important as rendering to the right codec is, if you don't have the right dimensions, frame rates or field order... it won't really matter much when it comes to delivery. SD or HD? D1, 1080i, 720p? What the heck am I building? Improper dimensions can lead to its own set of issues.

Have you ever loaded a clip into an Avid, only to find yourself with banding issues? That's usually the case when you let the Avid handle the resizing of a clip. A 720x486 clip being resized to 720x480 (DV25) will result in banding if you let the edit system do it. FCP does a better job at it, but why chance it? Get familiar with the basic resolutions. What better time than now, when we're bridging the gap between SD & HD. Understanding these formats and their field orders will allow you to understand how to properly prep and conform video to your timelines. No matter what the source is.

Before going any further I should note, there are quite a few ways to deal with pixel aspect ratios. Below are the ones I use. If you'd like to understand the math a little better check out Rick Gerard's article on the subject over at Creative Cow. Some of the SD settings listed below use a square pixel layout and should be resized for output in After Effects (AE). You may be asking yourself why you'd want to do that and not use the stretch function? Well the reason is AE does field rendering before it does the stretching, so you'd introduce improper fields into your footage if you're rendering interlaced. Lloyd Alvarez (man, small world) has made a script to automate this process.

Specs & Disclaimers... Below are the settings I use to build my content. While you'll notice some may not be in line with proper building techniques, they are the ones I've settled on over the years. With the nature of the news biz, you'll end up pushing the same animations to 3 different sources in a span of one day. So you'll clock me for disregarding a few pixels here and there (DV) but we're not working in the world of motion design. We don't have a lot of time to set up and make adjustments. It's basically doing and learning on the fly. "Breaking News" supersedes any kind of logic in set up, making "close enough" a part of our lives. With that in mind, use the settings kind of like a pirates code... They're more like guidelines anyway


SD Build 720x540 reduce to 720x486 29.97 lower fields first
Native Pixel Ratio of 1.064:1

DV Build 720x540 reduce to 720x480 29.97 lower fields first
Native Pixel Ratio of 0.9117:1
(yes I know there is a 6 pixel difference)

720p 1280x720 60p (progressive) 59.94
Native Pixel Ratio of 1:1

HDV 1440x1080
Native Pixel Ratio of 1.333:1

1080i 1920x1080 29.97 upper fields first
Native Pixel Ratio of 1:1

1080p 1920x1080 60p (progressive) 59.94
Native Pixel Ratio of 1:1

Most of these have 24p variants (progressive) or 23.98
And remember, levels should not exceed 16-235

Learning these few easy steps should yield a little less time staring at progress bars and hopefully a couple less headaches along the way.

As is the case with all the content on this site. Audience participation is encouraged. If you notice any errors in the notes above, feel free to drop me a line here. I'll be more than happy to make corrections and credit you for the submission. This is a learning process for all of us, so any additional thoughts on the subject are always appreciated.

:: Author: N. Santiago | Do not republish without authorization please ::

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