Posted by culture_mind on 09/11/07 13:21

Hello everyone,

I'm about to start compositing various short videos and lots of
photographs into a "holiday video" to distribute to friends. This time
around, I've chosen to use Sony Vegas (ver 7) solely so as to get a
feel for a non-adobe interface for once (for large / complex
compositions, the AfterEffects interface eventually becomes the
embodiment of "messy-ness" imho).

In essence: I cannot decide what project properties to use.

In the past, I was working exclusively for creating small compositions
for pc playback, and would always use an arbitrary canvas size
(320x240, 640x480 etc...), the straight 1:1 pixel ratio and an xvid
compression. Most of those small clips were for distribution via a
website etc.

Now I'm flirting with the idea (the source material can support it) of
working on a PAL resolution and aiming for a composition that will be
released to DVD. However, I realised that the pixel aspect ratio for
PAL (dv) is 1.0926 (after previewing a few test clips exported
as .avi).

Initially I want to distribute the video as an .avi file (xvid) for
playback from a pc but I would also like to have the option to create
a DVD.

My question:

What resolution / settings would you suggest I use? Shall I work on
PAL Standard or a custom straight-to-pc format? If I use PAL standard,
my composition will include several photographs / stills / text. Will
that be scaled properly if I decided to export to .avi with a
different pixel aspect ratio?

Thanks in advance,
Angelos

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