Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Round 3

09:38 < bemasc> emdash: So, the true parameters here are the storage height,
storage width, PAR, and DAR.
09:39 < bemasc> that's 4 values in total, but only 3 degrees of freedom.
09:40 < bemasc> Personally, I would expose all 4, and update PAR after each change to DAR (and vice versa)

How about this, then?
Starting to look a bit better? I kept the notion of 'Display resolution' mainly as a source of feedback, but it occurs to me now that perhaps little rectangle that represents the display aspect ratio would be a better idea. Unfortunately that would mean increasing the size of the dialog again.

I'm actually not so sure that DAR and PAR should update each other, as I played around with it and it's somewhat frustrating. I think most of the time you're either targeting a specific format (for example, 480i) in which case you'd just choose a preset, or you'll be working with square pixels.

I think i need to add a 'constrain aspect ratio' check-button to make scaling a bit easier.

3 comments:

Rob said...

That's looking better but, why the drop down box and the text box for the DAR? Personally, I think having both DAR and PAR available is useful, but I'm not the average Joe.

I think that DAR is most interesting to users, that and the ability to force square pixels. PAR could be presented for informational purposes.

brandon lewis said...

At the moment there's two reasons for the double-widgets:

The combo boxes provide frequently-used values. The text entries allow you to input an arbitrary fractional quantitiy.

On the one hand, people are used to seeing decimal approximations like 29.976FPS, but on the other hand internally this is really 30000:1001

In the case of DAR, I really think there should be some choices. In the case of PAR, maybe you're right and all I need is a switch between square/rectangular pixels.

If you can think of a better idea I'm all ears.

The dialog is meant to contain presets, support for which I haven't yet finished. Most of the time you will simply choose a preset. For defining new presets you could very well want control over PAR.

brandon lewis said...

What i mean is that In the case of DAR, I really think there should be some preset choices for common aspect ratios. Yet you still might want to be able to specify arbitrary ones for unusual purposes (video art installation, rare wide-screen formats, future uses I haven't imagined yet...)