16:9 what resolution?

Question

My friend in Germany is going to buy a 16:9 aspect ratio television monitor and DVD player to put in his bakery to play footage I shot and will edit for him. I do not know the monitor he is going to buy. I want to know what would be a good resolution to author the video in. I shot the video in 4:3 but intend to fill up the screen by compositing graphics and other footage on either side of the video placed in the center of the screen. I want to maintain quality and not scale the video up. So, what would be a safe resolution to create the video in?
Thanks,
James

Answer 1

It is not clear whether you have shot the footage already ("I shot the video in 4:3...") or if you will shoot it later ("...what would be a safe resolution to create the video in?") I think you already shot the footage, and you are asking what format to edit in.
In any case, shoot your footage with the highest quality format and camera you can afford and edit it with the sequence settings set to the same as the format you originated in.
Then either hire someone to do the compression to DVD for you, or experiment with compression on your own until you are happy with the results.
If the footage is only going to play there, you might want to shoot the footage on a PAL Camera. At the risk of stating the obvious, PAL is the television standard in most of Europe, Africa, Australia, and South America, as opposed to NTSC (US, Japan, and Central America), and SECAM (France, Eastern Europe, and Russia.)
If you don't have access to a PAL camera, or you already shot the footage NTSC, you will have to convert it to PAL. There are a number of ways of doing this. You could go to a dub house, or you could buy Nattress Standards Converter.
http://www.nattress.com/standardsConversion.htm
This will do the job very well, but it takes a good deal of time to render.
Do the standards conversion before you do the DVD Compression. I'm not knowledgeable about DVD compression, but that is where you are going to have to do most of your research and work to maintain quality.
It sounds like you have a plan for the 16x9 issue. If you don't want to use graphics all the time, try three layers. Blow up and blur the bottom layer. On the top is your unaffected video. In between is a black slug that you stretch, crop and soften to create a drop shadow for your video's left and right edges.
Good luck!
Tom