Hi David,

I counted only three conclusions. ;-)

With regard to "Neil would rather insult people than pay attention to what they have to say," that's only because I haven't edited this thread yet. When I put the shears away, you won't see anybody insulting anyone, because that's one of our rules. We try to at least give the impression that everybody likes each other on this site, by force if necessary, heh.

Now I'm just trying to figure out if this thread belongs here or in the Vegas forum.

Thanks for posting; by the way I gave you a custom title which should look familiar. Much appreciated,

Hi, Chris --

Touche'! Well, I *had* four, then combined two. :)

Your reputation as a class act precedes you, Chris. Glad to be aboard . . .

David

Chris,

I'd say you need to move this to Area 51 for two reasons:

1. I haven't read a thread more 'out there' on this forum.
2. The basic premise of the post is false and thus it must be rumor if it isn't true.
3. Any thread containing the word 'amygdala' needs to be safely tucked away.

Oh wait, that's three...ahhhh! Maybe if I crop one to 16:9...Barry Wan Kanobi...where are you?

I think David hit the nail on the head. Neil has heretofore been unaware of the concept of underscan, and is troubled by it. He's attempting to "fix" it. But in his attempt to "fix", he is unfairly slandering both the DVX and Vegas, when neither product is in any way "at fault". It's the nature of NTSC televisions. It's the way things have always been, it's the way things are.

So, here's the facts of the matter:

1) there is *nothing wrong* with Vegas. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

2) there is *nothing wrong* with the DVX. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Neil doesn't like what it's doing, and that's fine -- so he's changing it by scaling his image down. It is *not* "fixing" anything -- it is scaling the image down so that it sits within a smaller window. Which is decreasing resolution, and which will also add bigger black bars on televisions that don't overscan quite as much.

Neil, I have tested what you're suggesting. I've done it with letterbox footage and with 4:3 footage. The results are always the same: it shrinks the frame from 720x480 down to 720x436. If you prefer that look, for whatever reason, feel free to use it. But it's not a "fix", any more than applying color correction to a clip is a "fix" -- it's a stylistic choice, not a bug fix.

Regarding Vegas and the "safe area" -- if you're referring to the dashed-line overlay, there's nothing hard-and-fast about that. You can configure it to "protect" as much as you want. In the "preferences" dialog box you can configure different percentages for "action safe" and "title safe". No matter what you set them to, they do not affect your video in *any way* -- they're just guidelines to let you know where some TVs may start to cut off the image.

If you want to shrink your image down so that none of your image gets cut off by overscan, feel free to. Just recognize what you're doing: you're shrinking your footage, which means you are digitally resampling and scaling down your footage. That's something YOU'RE doing, not something the editing program is doing.

The editor deals with the pixels it's given. It uses .9091 because that *is* the aspect ratio of the video, and is the proper size. If you change that to 1.0, you are *forcing* the program to scale and mildly distort your video. "simulate device aspect ratio" has nothing to do with the video itself, and doesn't modify the actual video in any way (although it does make the preview window less accurate/fuzzier than it would otherwise be).

There are two concepts you don't seem to fully understand -- that of "square pixels" vs. "NTSC pixels", and that of "underscan". Read up on those two topics and you'll see that what everyone has been saying makes perfect sense, because it really, really is the way that it should be.

For DVX users or Vegas users who may have been alarmed by this thread, rest assured that there's nothing wrong. "Move along, nothing to see here..."

Ahhhhh. At last I can breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks to Barry's concise summation, I'm feeling a sense of closure finally. In fact now that Barry has straightened everything out, I think I'll extend that sense of closure to this thread, primarily to avoid going back around in circles again. Thanks to all for the brief but interesting drama. And now, back to our regular programming...

(Much appreciated as always, Barry -- for this, you have finally earned your custom title!)