Cropping strategy

[vorteX^]

Hi!
I'm ripping a movie for my collection and I want it to be perfect. But I can't decide what is the best way to crop it, please see the frame attached.
I have few ideas:
- Just leave at as is - that's what usually done.
- Remove only bottom line - it's just a distortion, not part of the frame.
- Remove only black bars, leaving distorted borders - because they provide some information (see left and right borders).
- Remove black bars and film borders so there is only clean image in the frame.
Also, after cropping, should I scale the image to 720x480? Preserving aspect ratio, of course.
Happy to hear your thoughts, thanks!

[Attachment 85397 - Click to enlarge]

[codemaster]

It's not necessary to resize to 720x480 after cropping the black borders. But it's probably better to resize to 640x480 or 720x540, because there are some video players on some smart TVs that ignore the aspect ratio that is set in the container. And in case you resize to 720x540, it's better to upscale 2x with nnedi3 before resizing to 720x540.

[jagabo]

Crop the video as you want and set the SAR (sampling aspect ratio) to the same as the original. See if your players play it properly.

[vorteX^]

It's not necessary to resize to 720x480 after cropping the black borders. But it's probably better to resize to 640x480 or 720x540, because there are some video players on some smart TVs that ignore the aspect ratio that is set in the container. And in case you resize to 720x540, it's better to upscale 2x with nnedi3 before resizing to 720x540.

In this scenario, when to deinterlace? Before upscale? During upscale with nnedi3?

Crop the video as you want and set the SAR (sampling aspect ratio) to the same as the original. See if your players play it properly.

Good note about fixing SAR, thanks.

[vorteX^]

I've just noticed that some scenes have really big left border, while others don't. If I crop it, I will loose 40 left pixels for the whole video.
Now scratching my head, maybe I should leave borders as is...

[codemaster]

If resizing to 720x540, first deinterlace with QTGMC preset medium, then upscale to 1440x960 with nnedi3_rpow2, then crop, then downscale to 720x540 with Spline36Resize. If resizing to 640x480, deinterlace, then crop, then downscale.

You can pause and skip ahead repeatedly to find the scenes with the smallest black borders, and crop only the smallest ones.

Or you can remux to mkv, and avoid cropping and encoding.

[lollo]

It's not necessary to resize to 720x480 after cropping the black borders. But it's probably better to resize to 640x480 or 720x540, because there are some video players on some smart TVs that ignore the aspect ratio that is set in the container. And in case you resize to 720x540, it's better to upscale 2x with nnedi3 before resizing to 720x540.

What Smart TVs are you referring to? In general the DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) is always respected, otherwise we could not display anything but just square pixel videos (D1 standard is 720x576 which must be streched to 768x576 according to 4:3 PAR just as example).

Defining the SAR, as explained by jagabo, allows to crop any quantity without altering the proportions when displayed, if the player is able to read and apply it.

No butchering of the video with square pixel resizing is necessary.