Authoring A DVD Widescreen From VHS Letterbox

[scottoinkingsburg]

Hello fellow digital video enthusiast! I am the type of guy who likes to tinker around with digital video. I like to learn something new every day. A few days ago I started to think about doing an expirement, not for reasons of quality, but just to learn how to do it. And I need a little bit of help. My neighbor just got a new HD widescreen tv, and I am fascinated on learning how to make my own videos in the widescreen format. First of all, I want to expirement with some videos that I have in letterbox on VHS. I do a lot of editing with my video, and I want to try something that will only take 3 hours of my time instead of 20+ hours. Anyways getting to the exact point. My first test I want to do is to record a letterboxed movie into my computer. From there I plan on using VirtualDub to de-interlace and crop the video to remove the "blocks" from the video. NOW here is the question I have. How would I author this video into a DVD with NERO? How do I go around the fact that my video is not the standard 720 by 480 29.97fps MPEG 2 4:3 DVD standard video? And what are the standard NTSC screen sizes for 1.85:1 aspect and 2.35:1 aspect ratio videos? My goal is to get a letterboxed movie, and make it fit the screen of my neighbors tv without any video streatching to fit his 1.85:1 aspect screen. If you have the answer to my question please email me. Thanks, Scotto

[guns1inger]

TMPGenc has templates for NTSC Widescreen (16:9 or 1.778:1). You need to crop your video to fit this ratio. This means you will either have to live with very narrow bars top and bottom, or crop slightly off the ends of the frame.

[scottoinkingsburg]

Thanks for the tip, I will look into TMPEGenc, I do have version 2.53. But I was really hoping to get an answer on standard pixel resolutions of DVD widescreen in both 16:9 and 1.85:1. Or does this vary? Is there even a standard widescreen pixel resolution for NTSC DVD?

[dphirschler]

Letterbox videos won't make good anamorphic widescreen DVDs. You might was well stretch them on the TV because you will just have to stretch them in software before you encode. You will gain no more detail than is already in the letterbox video.

The resolution of anamorphic DVDs is still 720x480. It's just that the image looks horizontally squished. It then gets stretched horizontally when displayed on a 16x9 TV. Also, unless the movie is exactly 16x9 (1.77:1) aspect ratio, then you will still get black bars. The wider the aspect ratio, the thicker the black bars will be.

If you want to experiment, capture one of your letterboxed VHS movies and then crop 60 pixel from the top and bottom so that it is 720x360. Then stretch that to 720x480 and encode as anamorphic widescreen.


Darryl