Maintaining original Letterbox

[twinegar]

I looked all over the forum first and didn't answer my ? I have a Letterbox movie loaded into TMPGEnc. I set the input as 16:9 and the output as 16:9 but I am winding up with the wide black bars across the top and bottom. What is the solution?

[salfter]

I looked all over the forum first and didn't answer my ? I have a Letterbox movie loaded into TMPGEnc. I set the input as 16:9 and the output as 16:9 but I am winding up with the wide black bars across the top and bottom. What is the solution?

Is your source true anamorphic widescreen (16:9)? Many movies are, but many others are letterboxed and should be played at 4:3. Theoretically, you could crop the source to 720x360, stretch it back to 720x480, and reencode to convert 4:3 letterboxed content to 16:9...but it's not going to improve the quality because a considerable amount of information was thrown out by the studio when it created a letterbox master instead of a widescreen master.