Making my own anamorphic widescreen

[Dragonsf]

As I capture a lot from SAT (most of them WS movies), I just wondered, if I could make my own anamorphic coding.As my source is 720x756 PAL DV and if the movie's aspect ration is at least 16:9, I have about 42% black on the screen.Is it possible, to crop this black borders (using AviSynth) and resize the frame to the next smallest DVD comaptible size (let's say 720x405 = 16:9 to 720x288 (anamorphic DVD half screen)).I can set the aspect ration bit while authoring.What do you think, will I gain anything with such settings - better compression or will I suffer from a bad resolution?

[energy80s]

You can crop out the borders (I think that its 72 pixels top and bottom) and resize the picture to 720x576. Set the TMPG output to 16:9 and the input to full screen. This should result in an anamorphic 4:3 image that will automatically switch to 16:9 in your DVD player.

[DJRumpy]

The amount to crop depends on the aspect ratio of your capture. First you must remove any letterboxing on your capture, and then, once you know what the actaul image area size of your capture is, divide the width, by the height. I can only give you NTSC examples, as I have no idea how it works for PAL.

For example, if you captured at 720x480 and the actual image area without letterboxing is 720x390, you would then divide 720/390. This would give you 1.85:1 for the aspect ratio.

Video with an aspect ratio of 1.85 is fullscreen for 16:9 video (no letterboxing), so you would resize this cropped image to the full resolution 720x480 (720x576 for PAL in your case).

If your video is 2.35:1, then it will still have letterboxing, even for 16:9 video (much less than 42% though). Maybe someone in PAL land can post the proper vertical values for PAL. For NTSC, the vertical image area for a 2.35:1 movie is 360, with 120 pixels of total letterboxing.

[Dragonsf]

For PAL the vertical res is 576 (as 480 in NTSC) or 288 (instead of 240).
The whole point (The reason why I wanted to to do that in the first place) is:I don't want to enlarge the frame, I want to shrink.
As stated above with 2.35:1 the effective used area is less than 50% of the frame.So (my thought) if I shrink the frame to the half (720x288 PAL), the encoder has fewer pixels to compress and with a given bitrate, this should result in a better compression (half as much data=twice as much bits per frame).
If you think this is futile,be frank to tell me.It's just an idea!

[energy80s]

But what are you going to watch it on? You can't just produce oddball frame sizes and expect a DVD player to be able to handle it.

[Dragonsf]

The goal is to watch it on a standalone player.If a standalone player can't can't play DVD half resolution, I should better forget the whole thing.

[BananaSkin]

I've run into the same problem.

I've got a 2.11:1 NTSC original source and when i convert to DVD MPEG-2 using 2.11:1 source aspect and output as full screen (keep aspect ratio) i get a just that a 4:3 image with the 2:11:1 picture in the middle section.

When I use IFOEdit to author the DVD the IFOs created states 4:3. I reset all these to 16x9 and burn with NERO Express 5.5.10.20. But when i test the disc on a Tosh 22E and W/S TV the image is squeezed i.e. 4:3 image squashed to 16x9. This contradicts what other people said it should do which is to crop most of the large borders off.

I also tested the disc on a Pioneer 636D (set to putput to 4:3 letterbox) on a 4:3 TV and again the image is squashed. When I try the 16x9 enabled VOB on my PC with PowerDVD it also plays in 16x9 but with a squashed 4:3 image. The only way I can play the disc correctly is the manually resize the screen on my W/S TV.

When I re-burn the disc with the IFO's set to 4:3 it plays in the correct ratio on the Pioneer 636D/4:3 TV setup and software DVD player.

Anyone know why its doing this? Is the TMPGEnc output somehow wrong? Is Nero buring incorrectly? Or am I not changing the IFO correctly? I tried setting the IFO so 16x9 aspect and Automatic Letterbox (with and without Letterbox cropping top & Bottom) but nothing seem to work.

Ta for any thoughts.


BananaSkin

[energy80s]

If a standalone player can't can't play DVD half resolution, I should better forget the whole thing.

Probably the best idea! Oh and the black borders aren't using any of your bitrate anyway. By encoding in anamorphic all you are gaining is vertical resolution.

[DJRumpy]

If you want to eliminate the black borders, your either going to have to get a widescreen tv, or convert it to fullscreen (4:3), or optionally, just downsample it to a lower aspect ratio (2.35 to 1.85 for instance will get you smaller letterboxing without chopping the movie up entirely). Neither option is very good. You certainly cannot randomly chop off letterboxing and expect it to play. DVD supports only 4 resolutions:

352x240 (288)
352x480 (576)
704x480 (576)
720x480 (576)

Items in parens are PAL of course. If your output doesn't match one of these, it will not play.

[Dragonsf]

Thanks DJRumpy, this will setlle it.I'll forget it.