Converting 4:3 Letterbox to 16:9 anamorphic

[davenlr]

I am currently attempting to transfer my collection of lasterdiscs, which are in 4:3 letterboxed format, to DVD. If I do a direct capture and burn with Spruceup, the resulting DVD is letterboxed, and using the TV's Zoom function zooms it in to 16:9 format filling the screen of my 16:9 monitor without any black bars at the top or bottom, and at the correct aspect ratio, however, by Zooming, it makes the Mpeg irregularities from the original capture stand out.
Using TMPGenc to create a "anamorphic" mpeg2 file, allows me to burn the dvd with the 16:9 aspect ratio already set, and the TV shows it correctly, but in order to get rid of the mpeg noise, I need to use TMPGencs noise filter, and custom screen information, which results in the reencode taking over 60 hours for a 2 hr movie, and the resulting file being 2X the size of a 4.7GB DVD using VBR.

Does anyone have a different method for authoring 4:3 letterbox material to DVD, or any method to capture just the program information without the additional lines which dont contain any information?

[lusid]

There is no advantage to converting from letterboxed to anamorphic. All you're doing is pre-stretching it in software. You won't get any more image detail, and you'll just be wasting mpeg bandwidth encoding the same details at a larger scale.

You might get a marginally better result by cropping out the letterbox bars and letting tmpgenc regenerate them when it encodes the file. This way it will generate perfect black bars, instead of encoding captured black bars, which may not be absolute black and may take more bits in the stream. Just try to crop it so the image height is divisible by 16.