Great on HDTV / BAD on SDTV
 

I shoot some test footage with my XH-A1 at 1080i / 24F, did a capture and log into FCP6.0 as ProRes442 then sent it to compressor and compressed it to an mpeg2 / ac3 file for DVD. I then took it into DVD Stuido Pro 4 and burned a DVD.

Problem:
When I watched it on my HDTV it looks fine (took up the entire screen), when I went to the other room and tried it on the 4:3 SDTV it looked very distorted and the aspect ratio was way off. Shouldn't it have put black bars on the top and bottom of the screen and keep the aspect ratio correct? There is no option on the TV to change from 4:3 to 16:9 but I have never had to do that before on ANY other movie I have ever watched.

Thanks for the help.
O.D.

Make sure that DVD player is set to 4:3 letterbox. If that doesn't work then you need to make sure that in DVDSP the track the video is in is set to 16:9. You might have to change DVDSP's configuration to "advanced" to get the right inspector window.

I will try that, thanks William

I tried it on my friends TV and it looks fine (has the black bars at top and bottom) so I guess I just have a cheap DVD player or TV.