Maxer

I'm doing an animation and it will be displayed on a wide screen LCD or Plasma TV, what is the correct resolution I should be using for this format?

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Brian Smith

Depends on a lot of things. Since you're in the U.S., I would for suggest 720x480. If you get a HD-DVD recorder, due out this month I believe, you have the option of playing back at 1280x720 or 1920x1080. You also have the option of rendering at high def resolution and down converting to standard dvd quality. When you do, everything will be remarkably sharper and have less problems like flickering and pixel dancing, etc.

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www.3dats.com
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Maxer

This thing is going to play off of a DVD player so on a wide screen TV, I know that standard TV resolution in NTSC is 720x480 but I figured a wide screen format would require a different resolution since the aspect ratio was different. Is that wrong?

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Ernest Burden

Standard old-fashioned NTSC is 525 x 525 with the overscan top and bottom removed to result in a 4:3 proportion, and is interlaced.

The 720x480 (sometimes written as 720x486) is for progressive scan. You need to find out if your piece needs to be interlaced, probably the 1080i format

There was a post at cgTalk by Simon Wicker that covers a lot of this:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost...93&postcount=1

from it:

He suggests no reason to render interlaced, if its needed the output app will do it. I don't know either way but he seems to.

By the way, I've always rendered to the 720x480 size, and been happy with it. But hi-def TVs are getting bigger and sharper, and maybe that size will no longer impress.

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AcmeDigital
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Ernest Burden

I forgot to address this:

The difference is not the resolution, its the Pixel Aspect Ratio. Widescreen simply uses a non-square pixel to make the image wider.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

manta

I believe that the HDTV setting in Max will work, it works out to an aspect ratio of 1.78 which should be correct for 16:9 widescreen tv's...

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Maxer

Thanks Ernest that helps, I just though since the screen was different the resolution was to but I'm glad it's not because I'm doing this in Maxwell and I didn't want to increase my render times any more than they are now.

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Maxer

If I use that then my resolution comes out to be 720x405, is that going to cause problems?

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manta

Hmmm... lets work on this from another direction, what aspect ratio is your DVD authoring software going to accept ?? they can be very picky when they encode to mpeg2

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Ernest Burden

Oh, red flag!

Notice that doing widescreen involved non-square pixels. The render engine has to know that. Can MWR do a PAR other than 1:1? If so, go with the 720x480@PAR .9 If not....uh, well.... render to 864 x 480@1:1, but no.

Let's see, Photoshop CS will convert a PAR, but the issue is not having your image distorted. The DVD burning software forces a PAR, outputting to Quicktime is where I came up with the 720>864 conversion.

Before you do anything find out about MWR and its PAR abilities.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering