mixture of 16:9 and 3:4 videos in project but can't remove horizontal letter boxing
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OK, so i've been working on a project for the last couple of months and it's show time this weekend at Taniwha's Den... in a beautiful remote part of NZ projecting onto a 40m high river cliff on Friday night and in a forest the next.
I have over 100 16:9 movies (ranging from 1280x720 to 1920x1080) loaded plus another 400 4:3 movies (all 320x240) loaded. I've set the projector actor to "keep aspect" off and video preferences to "scale to largest Image" (when combining video).
When i combine a 16:9 movie with a 4:3 movie (using the "effect mixer" actor) there's no horizontal letter boxing but if i just play a 4:3 video out horizontal letter boxing appears. Seems i have two options to fix this:
1. change the ratio of the 400 4:3 movies to 16:9
2. update my project so when movies 101 to 500 are selected to play out they're stretched horizontally
Are these my only two options or is there any other way within Isadora to fix this?
cheers, Mr J
Izzy 3.2.6 | MBP (16-inch, 2023) M2 Max 96GB | macOS 13.2.1
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@mr_j said:
1. change the ratio of the 400 4:3 movies to 16:9
If possible it's best to have all your media be of the same resolution, codec, wrapper, and framerate for each project (ideally matching the native resolution and refresh rate of the displays that you are using). That's kind of a tall order for changing 400 movies, but it's a good thing to keep in mind for future projects. That being said, I'd suggest going with option #2 for the most convenient fix this time around.
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you might just be able to add a Scaler actor and set it to scale all videos to your output size.
This will stretch out the 3:4 video to match the 16:9 (assuming you set a 16:9 size in the Scaler)
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Does using scaler have any impact on performance? If i use it then would be best to set to scale everything to 1920x1080 but if performance is impacted then maybe to 1280x720?
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Yes, if you are scaling things up it will take more video memory, and any additional effects will use more resources.
You could even dynamically resize your video from 3:4 to the corresponding 16:9 (get video size, do some calculations, set width and height for a Scaler actor).
Depending on your usage you may be best to leave the scaling until just before output, or right at the beginning of the video chain. It does all depend a bit on your usage.
If 1280x720 works for you, then yes, its going to be lighter weight on resources than 1080p -
I have the same problem and use 2 separate lines of playback, one for 16:9 and the other 4:3 and crop the 4;3 in the video mapping input parameters of the projector.
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@mr_j said:
I have over 100 16:9 movies (ranging from 1280x720 to 1920x1080) loaded plus another 400 4:3 movies (all 320x240) loaded. I've set the projector actor to "keep aspect" off and video preferences to "scale to largest Image" (when combining video).
First, while @DusX 's idea is valid, using the 'zoom' input of the projector would be the lowest impact way of scaling the image. The Scaler actor has to create a new texture on the graphics card (GPU) and upscale/downscale the image. That's a bit less efficient.
Second, you don't want to use "scale to largest image" because it introduces uncessary scaling that will slow down your patch and it won't give you the right result anyway.
Instead, take a look at this Isadora 3.0.7. Does that solve the problem? I'm using the Get Video Size actor to calculate the aspect ratio, and then changing the zoom on the Projector as appropriate. I commented everything so you'll understand the process.
Best Wishes,
Mark
