Please Clarify Image Size and Digital to Analogue

[Integrity]

There is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.

What are you planning on doing with your final Quicktime file?

If your putting it on the Internet or something else that doesn't deal with television or DVD you shouldn't have to worry about all the non-square pixel stuff. Just render it out at 480x270 or higher, and edit it with iMovie using square pixels if it lets you (I've never used iMovie so I don't know what it lets you do).

If you are eventually putting it out on television or DVD or something that deals with the NTSC standard (since I see that you're in Canada), then you should render out at the resolution of DV which is 720x480 with a pixel ratio of 1.2. But I suggest you render in square pixels at 853x480 or something higher then let iMovie do the ratio work.

All of this, again, depends on where you're going with your movie.

[BUZZFX]

There is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel.

What are you planning on doing with your final Quicktime file?

If your putting it on the Internet or something else that doesn't deal with television or DVD you shouldn't have to worry about all the non-square pixel stuff. Just render it out at 480x270 or higher, and edit it with iMovie using square pixels if it lets you (I've never used iMovie so I don't know what it lets you do).

If you are eventually putting it out on television or DVD or something that deals with the NTSC standard (since I see that you're in Canada), then you should render out at the resolution of DV which is 720x480 with a pixel ratio of 1.2. But I suggest you render in square pixels at 853x480 or something higher then let iMovie do the ratio work.

All of this, again, depends on where you're going with your movie.

Integrity,

Thanks for the reply. I want to render it for the internet and for television. iMovie has a nasty habit of scaling the image so bleck bars appera on both sides of the image when using the Ken Burns effect so this is a problem if I don't have the exact right image size.

You said I need the NTSC standard since I live in Canada. Why does this make a difference?

Finally, shouldn't I render the image at a larger resolution than 853 x 480 for better quality?

Finally, What do you use ofr Editing? I just bought iMovie, but would Finall Cut Express or Finall Cut Pro be easier to use as far as what size of images to use?

[scrimski]

You said I need the NTSC standard since I live in Canada. Why does this make a difference?

NTSC has a size and framerate different to PAL. Playing a PAL video(which has 25 fps) on NTSC would cause running the video to fast, because NTSC plays more frames per second.
The resolution is different, PAL has 720*576 nonsquare pixels, NTSC 720*540(I could be wrong, siincde I don't use NTSC, it's the measures from one of the AfterEffects presets)

[BUZZFX]

NTSC has a size and framerate different to PAL. Playing a PAL video(which has 25 fps) on NTSC would cause running the video to fast, because NTSC plays more frames per second.
The resolution is different, PAL has 720*576 nonsquare pixels, NTSC 720*540(I could be wrong, siincde I don't use NTSC, it's the measures from one of the AfterEffects presets)

Why isn't there a universal standard of fps and DV fomat. Wouldn't this make all this a lot easier?

[scrimski]

Sure it would.
It has more historical reasons: Wernher von Braun used the frequency of the german electricity net for the timing of the fields(50 Hertz=50 fields=25 frames per second) since it was the most stable and broadly available source for precise timing in Germany in the 1930s - at least this is what I was told in school. Since the US and Canada have a different electricity frequnecy, the value for the framerate differs.
There are some more differences in PAL and NTSC than framerate and size, mainly regarding the transmission of color and reference signals.
Of course it would be possible to create one standard, but it's kind of a monkey business. Who will develop this standard and why other companies should use this standard. The actual standard doesn't have to be the best available either. It was the same with VHS and Betamax, now we have this nonsens with different DVD formats. It's about money, not logic.
And this would mean that everybody would have to buy new hardware, software and equipment. Even the actual RGB television is based on a system 50 years old, just to assure that people only using a b/w telly could watch the program, although technically a better quality is possible for a long time.

[Tagger]

the fact that the framedifference will be around for a while is proven yet again by the comming of HD. While there are no technological needs to make two different standards they made both a 50 and 60 field norm for it. Simply because if they wouldnt have done it, every broadcastingcompany in europe would simply face bancrupcy when they want to change to HD since their entire net is genlocked on 50 Hz and in their perspective it's "a lot easyer" to just leave things like they are. :)

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