720 X 480

[vader7624]

if i lower resolution from 720X480 to a smaller resolution will it appear smaller on my tv screen?

[Big_Jit]

No, It wont. But the quality will decrease...

[vader7624]

im encoding a source that is 480 how do i get it to look bigger on my tv with out quality decrease

[baz00ie]

Generally speaking, for those of you just starting out...

Don't get too worked up about 720x480 or 704x480 unless you intend to have your video broadcasted from your local television station. These resolutions were decided upon when video was first digitized onto computers and they needed the extra horizontal pixels to hide video noise and artifacts produced by the early capture cards. The final output to TV is going to endup at a 4:3 ratio.

The 720x480 screen gets squashed into a 4:3 ratio because your TV uses non-square pixels, however, a computer uses square pixels and a resolution of 720x480 will appear too fat and distorted when played back. Inorder to make a video image look correct on a computer, you have to capture at the same ratio of 4:3 - in other words 640x480.

Also, that 640x480 image will look just fine when you play it back on your TV - because your computer takes care of the aspect ratio for you.

(...remember to set your monitor resolution to a square 4:3 ratio as well, ie: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1600x1200, etc...)

How it looks on your TV depends on the aspect ratio you set for play back (4:3), not how it was for final render.

Example:
SVCD is often rendered at 480x480, because in most cases, the horizontal detail is less important than the vertical detail. You would capture the video at 640x480(4:3), create your SVCD at 480x480(1:1) and then playback the video at a 4:3 ratio - everything will look fine.

To increase the quality of the image, you may/will have to process the video before final render. ie: de-interlace or inverse telecine

If you capture a video broadcast (ie: a gameshow) and you intend to keep the resolution at 640x480, then you need to de-interlace to make it look good on your computer. If you 're going to resize to 320x240 - then you don't need to de-interlace.

If you capture a movie from video (ie: Gone With The Wind) then you will need to processes it using inverse-telecine to reduce the frame rate from 29.97FPS to 23.976FPS (NTSC). It's best to do this process on video that was captured at ***x480 so that you're working with all the scan lines. You'll need all the scan lines to help insure a successful reconstruction.

After that you can resize to 320x240 and/or create a final render.

My 2 cents
baz