4:3 to 16:9 - pillarboxing or windowboxing?

[ecc]

Okay, I think I've got the hang of converting 4:3 to 16:9 by cropping off the top and bottom (with virtualdub) and encoding it as a fullscreen 16:9 display (with The FilmMachine using QuEnc) but what if I want to fit the full 4:3 non-letterboxed frame into a 16:9 display with bars on the sides (as well as the top and bottom when watching on a non-widescreen monitor)? I ask this because I want to take some captured 4:3 footage (shots and clips) and edit it into a 16:9 project.

I know that on some laserdiscs, technicians might windowbox a title sequence if the titles strayed outside the TV safe area and there are more and more DVD companies that place mattes on the sides of the frame to convey an entire 1.66:1 frame in an anamorphic presentation rather than cropping the frame to 1.78 (like those older James Bond special editions that MGM put out - though they've unfortunately not anamorphically enhanced any of their newer 1.66 releases, leaving them 4:3).

As the 4:3 footage is not mine and it was shot at a time when 4:3 was the standard with no thought at all for composing for widescreen, I'd like to present the full image for those clips.

I would be grateful for any information - or links if this has been discussed before here or somewhere else. I wasn't exactly sure what sort of buzzwords to type into the search engine here or in Google.

[Cornucopia]

4:3 playing out to a 16:9 display AUTOMATICALLY "pillarboxes" or windowboxes the title. This is done in a 16:9 displays setup.

Hard-encoding 4:3 with pillarbox padding for 16:9 is adding insult to injury--DON'T DO IT! The only reason one might justifiably do that is if one is editing some 4:3 footage into a 16:9 show--then this is done within the editing app before encoding (and only to the 4:3 portion/segments).

BTW, the idea of taking 16:9 footage and arbitrarily cropping, just to fit the full 4:3 screen, makes me cringe! (You can guess my preference)

Scott

[FulciLives]

I remember reading about this before but never paid much attention as I don't have a 16x9 TV and all 16x9 TV's have a mode where the 4:3 image is centered with black on either side (without stretching the image etc.) so ... I don't much see the point of 4:3 encoded as 16x9 unless you are mixing aspect ratios.

For instance I have an Anchor Bay DVD that has a bunch of trailers all on the same VTS and some are WIDESCREEN and some are FULL SCREEN so the FULL SCREEN trailers got encoded 16x9 and look like this:

VirtualDubMod image straight from DVD (720x480):


Resized for proper viewing on a computer monitor (852x480):


The first image is how it looked on the DVD and the second image is how it would look on your TV if you have a 16x9 TV. The problem is if you only have a 4:3 TV then you get the dreaded "postage stamp" look ... see image below:

This is what it looks like on a 4:3 TV:


Sorry but I don't know what the math is here but I'm sure someone will come along with it

Basically you would take your 4:3 image at 720x480 and add "X" amount of black to either side then resize to 720x480. I think ... I stress think ... that the math is 960x480 so you take your 720x480 4:3 image and add 120 black on either side, giving you 960x480 then you resize that 960x480 back to 720x480 giving you an image that should look like the first picture I posted. The 852x480 is resized for the square pixels that a computer monitor uses but DVD does not use square pixels so like I said I think it is 960 but I'm not 100% sure on that.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ecc]

Thanks for all the responses.

I haven't chosen an editing app yet (probably going with Premiere unless I can get the hang of Linux and try that Cinelerra program; I've also got a copy of the free version of Avid) but when I put a 4:3 clip into a 16:9 timeline in the woefully underequipped Windows Movie Maker that came with my program, it stretches the image to fill the frame. Is this the case with all editing programs (would I have to add the mattes to the sides myself?) or do some automatically recognize this and center the 4:3 image?

With my 1.66:1 discs that are 16:9 enhanced, I can see the difference between the side mattes which are apparently encoded into it and the top and bottom mattes which the player apparently adds (especially if you increase the brightness).

[manono]

Hi-

Is the source 4:3 at 720x480? Are you familiar with AviSynth? If so, you can use FitCD to give you the AviSynth script file for what you want to do:

LanczosResize(544,480,0,2,720,476)
AddBorders(88,0,88,0)

That's with the ITU box checked. It's slightly different with it off. After cropping a couple of pixels from the top and bottom in order to maintain proper AR, it adds 88 pixels of black to both the left and right sides.

With my 1.66:1 discs that are 16:9 enhanced, I can see the difference between the side mattes which are apparently encoded into it and the top and bottom mattes which the player apparently adds (especially if you increase the brightness).

Yes, 1.66:1 movies encoded as 16:9 have black bars hard encoded to the left and right sides of the active video. And if viewing on a 4:3 TV set, black bars are added to the top and bottom by the player.

[ecc]

BTW, the idea of taking 16:9 footage and arbitrarily cropping, just to fit the full 4:3 screen, makes me cringe! (You can guess my preference)

I wasn't sure what you meant by this remark at first. What I meant by "16:9 fullscreen" when I was talking about the setting for The FilmMachine. After checking off "16:9 display" I select "fullscreen" as opposed to the other options which are "add borders to keep aspect ratio" or "crop video to keep aspect ratio" because I have cropped the square pixel from 720x480 to 720x360 so it should fit into the the 16:9 display (when the encoder stretches it horizontally and vertically to 853/480) into a 16:9 image without any borders or additional cropping. I would never crop 16:9 to 4:3 fullscreen either (just as I detest cropping 2.35:1 movies to 1.78:1 so that viewers don't have to see black bars on their high-definition sets).

As for AviSynth, I still need to learn the program. I have not had one script execute correctly with either virtualdub or quenc (only the ones that The FilmMachine generates itself work). I prefer GUIs (though it seems like AviSynth scripts will allow you to do more in the longrun so I'll have to keep practicing). I'm downloading FitCD as I write this.

Thanks.

[FulciLives]

I played around with the math and using PhotoShop and it appears to me that there is one of two ways to do this properly.

Assuming you are starting out with a 720x480 4:3 image.

1.) Add 120 black to either side which makes the image 960x480 ... then resize back to 720x480

2.) Resize from 720x480 to 544x480 ... then add 88 black on either side which makes the image 720x480

Either way should work.

I'm thinking (educated guess) that optioin 2 should work within your editing program. I'm not very "experienced" with advanced editing program but I have VEGAS 5 and I opened up a VOB file from a TV DVD which has a 720x480 full screen 4:3 aspect ratio. From inside VEGAS 5 I was able to adjust the screen so that it was resized from 720x480 to 544x480 with black on the sides (still 720x480 total), thus turning it into 16x9 4:3 video ... as you want.

So if VEGAS 5 can do this ... hopefully so does your editing program.

Of course this can be done with AviSynth as well as VirtualDub etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ecc]

Thanks, John. Its nice to run into a Fulci fan.

[guns1inger]

I have just worked on something similar. The source was a low quality VHS capture made many years ago, so blowing it up to full screen was not really an option. I took the approach of hard pillarbox in a 16:9 encode, but when I authored I set the project to allow for pan and scan if the player was set for 4:3 pan and scan output and letterbox for 4:3 letterbox output. This means that anyone with a 4:3 TV can choose to watch the disk full frame 4:3 by setting the output of their DVD player to 4:3 pan and scan, or watch it windowbox by setting the output to latterbox. Widescreen veiwers will get it pillarbox by default.

This was authored with DVD Lab Pro, and I did find that those settings weren't correctly written to the IFO files (P&S was, letterbox wasn't), but a quick trip through IFO edit sorted that out.

On a side note, DVD Lab Pro seems to see 704 footage from CCE as half-D1 when writing the IFO files - has any one else noticed this ?

[vhelp]

That is one reason why I like so much, ifoEdit.. because it
does not (based on my experience) taint the Aspect Ratio.

-vhelp 3526

[SatStorm]

DVB music channels in Europe, currently have to deal with 16:9 and 4:3 videos. Most transmit 4:3 and letterbox the 16:9 image.
But the last year, some british music (mostly) channels do the opposite! They trasmit 16:9 and letterbox 4:3!
When you have sky's reciever (a digibox that is), you can output the picture on various ways. The problem is that some of those channels don't follow the logic of digibox and some wierd stuff end up on the screen at times!