I recently burned some high-def 720P home movies onto a Blu-Ray disc using software on my computer. When I play the disc on my Blu-Ray player and HDTV, the edges of the image are cropped off. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that some captions I added near the bottom/sides of the frame are being sliced in half, making them unreadable.
I’ve flipped through the various display settings on my TV, and can’t find one that displays the entire original 1280x720 image. I thought maybe it was the DVD-authoring software (Sony DVD Architect), but after plugging my camera directly into the TV and displaying raw 1280x720 video footage, I’m now convinced it’s the TV that’s doing the cropping.
I have since learned about the concept of overscan. However, wikipedia suggests that this isn’t an issue for modern, digital, flat-screen, fixed-pixel HDTV display units. My TV is a 65" Panasonic plasma, only 18 months old. Why would it be displaying less than the entire HDTV image being fed to it?
Is this unusual, or common? If I send the aforementioned Blu-Ray disc to some relatives for viewing, will they encounter the same problem with unreadable captions, or are things likely to display just fine for them?
In order to stop my 65" Panasonic (TH-65PF10UK) from overscanning, I had to enable “1:1 Pixel Mode” in the setup menu.
There’s a surprising amount of HD programming with garbage in the borders (Palladia HD is a persistent offender). Overscanning by default stops a lot of complaints about “what are these bright white dots on the edges of the screen?”.
How is the TV connected to the player? Hopefully it is via a digital cable (HDMI, DVI, etc.). When using an analog connection, the panel has to guess where the frame is, and there are a bunch of controls to move the picture around and re-size it, none of which are needed in digital mode.
I would expect your authoring software to be able to display the SMPTE Safe Area guides and warn if titles were placed outside that area. For reference, the Safe Title Area is 90% of the width and height, while the Safe Action Area is 93%. Assuming you’re not a SMPTE member, you can read an overview of SMPTE ST 2046-1 here (PDF).
I just got a Panasonic P50G25 and had to do some exploring to get my computer’s HDMI output to display fully. The key on TV end was under Menu --> Picture --> Aspect adjustments --> HD size --> Size 2.
Size 1 shows only 95% of the image, while Size 2 shows the whole thing.
Dunno if your menu system will be the same, but I’m guessing the solution will be related.
Thanks for this tip; I will look for this option in my own TV’s menus. Meanwhile, I will re-edit my movies to position the captions further from the edge of the screen. My target audience is my (elderly) in-laws, and I don’t want to make them hunt for those menu options.
So to use Palladia HD as an example…are they putting out a full 720 (or 1080) image, and then there’s garbage just above/below the edges? Or is the aforementioned garbage contained within the bounds of that 720/1080 image?
Connection between Blu-Ray player and TV (in my case) is via HDMI. In-laws have an all-in-one HDTV/Blu-Ray-Player unit of some sort.
So if my TV is cropping the full HD image, and stretching the cropped image to fill the entire display area, does than mean it’s resampling? I mean there’s 1080 pixels on the display panel, so if the TV is chopping the incoming signal down to, say, 1004 pixels (93% of 1080), and then stretching it to fit, isn’t that going to necessarily downgrade the image quality? I suppose there’s resampling going on if I’m feeding a 720 signal to a 1080 display, but at least in that case it’s a 1.5:1 resampling, not a weird 1.075268817…:1 resampling.
Or does my 1080P TV not actually have a full 1080 lines of pixels on its display?
It is within the bounds of the image, and shows up on the left or the right depending on the programming. And not all of their programming has the problem. I saw it the other night on their Fleetwood Mac in Boston concert video, which is probably still in rotation if you want to try to catch it. Note that I use DirecTV - a different provider may use different encoding and the problem may be less obvious.
Yes. Somewhat excusable on the analog inputs. I don’t see the logic (no pun intended) for doing it on the digital inputs. By the way, the ATI Catalyst (PC video card driver) deliberately underscans if it detects it is connected to a TV (yup, even in digital mode) in order to compensate for the TV overscanning. You can change this via an obscure menu item (in Catalyst 10.11 and older - 10.12 introduces new menus which I haven’t seen yet).
It should have at least 1080. My Panasonic (again, TH-65PF10UK, a commercial model) has a few pixels more than 1920 x 1080 so that it can shift the image by 1 or 2 pixels every 30 seconds, in order to lessen image burn-in and retention (two different phenomena).
The software I’ve been using (Sony Vegas/DVD Architect) includes “safe area” overlays in the editor, but they’re pretty restrictive, limiting titles to a region that’s only 90% of the original image size. Per Terry Kennedy’s and Pasta’s, suggestions, I searched my owner’s manual and then found the menu setting on my TV, and the factory default is indeed to crop the source image to 95% of its original size before displaying it. I’ve switched my own TV to 1:1 display now.
However, my in-laws also own a late-model Panasonic, so it’s a fair bet that their TV is doing the 95% thing. Rather than try to explain to them how to change it to 1:1, I’ve made an overlay *.GIF file that shows me where that 95% boundary is during movie editing, so I’m in the process of relocating all my captions so things will display properly for them.
Meanwhile, for interested readers, I found this helpful article on the why’s and how’s of overscan for HDTV.
So your TV/monitor might be a native resolution of 1920x1200 instead of 1920x1080.
So 16:10 instead of 16:9 (which the video is made at)
Also possible. If you are running the video feed through a receiver like a Yamaha RX. It could be doing additional overscan work to the heed. Or even worse, since most widescreen displays aren’t 16:10. High-def players don’t accept the extra resolution.