Can you mix aspect ratios on a DVD? I want to have the menu at 4:3 and the main program at 16:9. Will DVD Studio Pro even support this? Will manufacturing houses support this?

Using DVD Studio Pro 4, telling it to be a 16:9 format automatically creates HD DVD.

There is NO real 16:9 SD media so something here is misleading. Are you using anamorphic recorded SD looking like 16:9 or what?

What camera/format were these clips recorded into? The output of Compressor can change formats to some degree, but it may take a very long time.

Disregard this whole post. My DVD PLAYER'S settings somehow got knocked out of whack and that caused the image to stretch. My DVD's are fine. Whew!!!!! Thanks for helping though.

This brings up an interesting point, though.

For the past few years, we have been been shooting and editing everything in HDV - 16:9. Very infrequently, we have had to put 4:3 footage on our DVDs that are 16:9 anamorphic...for example, we shot a wedding and edited the whole thing, and the customer wants us to put on their photo montage that someone else did for them that's in 4:3. I have just been doing that in DVDSP...controlling the aspect ratio that way, but now I'm changing my methods...starting today, actually.

All my menus are setup for 16:9 Pan/Scan and Widescreen, and all the videos are 16:9 widescreen. This way, the menu will fill the entire screen, regardless of TV size, and the video will fill the screen on a widescreen TV, and be letterboxed on an old fashioned 4:3 TV.

I have a corporate project now that has all been shot and edited in HDV, but now they want to add some old footage to the DVD...as a separate menu item. This time, I'm going to import the 4:3 footage into my HDV timeline (a 16:9 SD timeline could be used too), and put it over a background (like what you see on network HD programming when they're mixing SD footage), and import that into DVDSP as 16:9 Pan/Scan and Widescreen, so that the aspect ratio is always correct...and not stretched wide on a 16:9 TV.

The things we gotta do....

Casey
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Just to confirm:

You can have 4:3 & 16:9 menus in a project with no problem. You can also have 4:3 Menus with 16:9 Tracks if you want.

Using DVD Studio Pro 4, telling it to be a 16:9 format automatically creates HD DVD - This is not true so something else is up if this is happening to you.

There is NO real 16:9 SD media so something here is misleading. - This is not true. Recordable media doesn't have an aspect ratio. Basically, display flags are read which tell the player how to display the content and your TV/DVD Player settings should ideally match to get the expected output.