MorganA
03-16-2009, 05:06 PM
Hey Guys -
I apologize for advance for the ignorance of this question but I havent really found anything that's given me a real answer as to how this works.
Im fairly new to the TV graphics world, but soon we are going to be upgrading to HD, but it also needs to fit within SD. How in the heck do I set up my graphics when I create them? So I need to be using SD safe areas? I feel totally lost here. Will the TV automatically compensate?
We are going to 1080i.
Thanks!
erikh
03-17-2009, 06:17 AM
I made this graphic (http://erik.mentalcase.net/chyronforums/4x3centercut.png) as a guide for this question. It's 720p but it scales the same to 1080i. Basically you are going to waste 25% of your width, with the active 4x3 area being 12.5% from both the left and right sides of your 16x9 frame. What you actually do with that area varies. On election night ABC put a bunch of extra trivia in there that wouldn't really be missed when it was centercut for SD.
On the subject of TVs compensating, that's really up to people setting up their equipment correctly, whether that is a viewer, your engineering department, or the techs at a cable company taking your signal. Downconversion options are to centercut and lose 12.5% of the picture on each side, display a squishy anamorphic picture (don't laugh, I know people that actually prefer this), or letterbox. Properly configured professional gear in your facility feeding SD to cable providers may be set up to use different methods based on what it's being fed (letterbox for network programming, centercut for your news, etc).
If the appearance of the 4x3 centercut is a serious concern, try to set up a preview chain with a downconverter feeding a 4x3 SD monitor so you can see when you're losing too much detail.
Also, if you have any pull whatsoever, please try to convince your higher-ups to actually use the whole 16x9 frame and letterbox the SD outputs instead of centercutting them.