Re: [DCP-o-matic] anamorphic video

Am 30.10.2014 um 23:26 schrieb Carl Hetherington: Oh, of course it would have to be scaled, the problem right now is that I can not put it into a DCP 'properly', unscaled WITH the proper aspect ratio correction. The 'no scale' option was brought up (I think in this list) so that one could use any size footage without upscaling, just by padding top/bottom/sides with black. Now that works for real square pixel footage - but not for 16:9/anamorphic, because there is no option to turn it into square pixels without upscaling - the only option to get it into 16:9 AR is to apply a scale to 16:9 - but that also blows it up to 1920*1080 in a flat container. I wouldn't care for this specific video, as I could turn it into what I wanted with the 16:9 option - but then I tried to find out wether DCP-o-matic ommited a 16:9 flag in the file, loaded it into media players, tested DCP-o-matic with a now 'normal' 16:9 DVD VOB file - and found the same issue with it. So, essentially, we can not create a flat container from a 16:9 VOB with ONLY the Pixel AR corrected to 1024/768 and padded with black on all sides. And that's what I thought is a missing link if we want to make sense to that 'no scale' option. You are of course right that from a signal processing perspective, there is not much difference between an anamorphic->square pixel scale, and an upscale to 1920/1080. But I think the no-scale option has some good uses, so it should work with non-square pixels as well, because so much content is still 16:9/non-square. Funny thing - yesterday I talked to a fellow projectionist and he told me he was still using DVD-o-matic. I told him he should make the switch, there is nothing to worry, and he said he would. Then he asked me why the hell would DVD-o-matic always 'stretch' content vertically when he first imports it. It seemed annoying to him, although not much work to correct. I didn't think about that much until I imported that AVI file today and noticed essentially the same behaviour. Obviously he converts a lot of 16:9 anamorphic stuff and always has to correct the AR first. Admittedly, I don't remember how DVD-o-matic arranged the scaling options back then. I remember you reorganized them at some point because they became too confusing and partly redundant. In fact that file I converted today is of somewhat mediocre quality, so my first attempt was to create a DCP with it centered on the screen, surrounded by black padding. Then I noticed there is no way in DCP-o-matic to do this, because 16:9 currently is the only option to adjust AR properly, and that goes with a full frame blow-up. I guess I'm thinking of people trying to convert 16:9 DV-tape or 16:9 DVD stuff without wanting to blow it up to full screen because it wouldn't hold the quality. And yes, immediately I thought the same - maybe the 'default-scale-to' pref is not useful. In fact I thought it would be better for the users to first see the content after import exactly like it is in the preview window. Unscaled, unstretched, but with the native AR applied. Then start to apply stretch/scale factors as needed. Of course, this would be nearly the same as a 'default-scale-to' pref set to 'no scale' - just that now it wouldn't deal properly with non-square pixels. Anyway, this is not urgent, we better think about this for a while. We don't want to mix up the scaling options every other version number ;-) As weird as it is, this is one of the great features in DCP-o-matic, and at the same time it's a real curse... - Carsten