How much to crop for 16x9??

[crazydiamond]

Hello all,

I am trying to make my own DVDs of the Star Wars trilogy (widescreen), not becuase I am pirating it as much as I just really dig the films and want something other than VHS to watch them on.

I would like to make it 16x9. I am using a Philips DVDR75 standalone DVD recorder to transfer from VHS to DVD (along with the "black box" to get rid of all the COPY PROT messages).

In TMPGENC there is an option to rerender DVD video to 16x9, and it works fine, but when you start with 4:3 video the image looks all stretched out. If I crop the top and bottom of the frame all I lose is part of the black bars (no image loss) and it looks normal, but my question is this:

How much do I need to crop the top and bottom of the frame in TMPGEnc to get an accurate 16x9 image? I have estimated about 65 on each side, is that even close?

[ronnylov]

It is better to leave it in original format as 4:3 because you will loose qaulity if stretching and reencoding. Especially if the source was interlaced you will get problems when resizing vertically. And it's not possible to say how much to crop without knowing your original resolution (PAL and NTSC have different resolutions).

[non-linear]

And it's not possible to say how much to crop without knowing your original resolution (PAL and NTSC have different resolutions).

There's also the matter of the actual aspect ratio. Just because it's widescreen, that doesn't make it 16x9. There are many different widescreen aspect ratios. So if it's not 16x9, you will probably have some black bars left.

My advice is to just encode it as 4x3, and author it as such.

[geek rock]

from what i can remember (not using a PC any more)..

if you crop your existing video (which, in the case of star wars, will be 2.35:1), select the "keep aspect ratio" button (checkbox?) in tmpgenc, and encode the video as 16:9. this should produce the correct ratio. what you're basically doing here is cropping out EVERYTHING except for the main image itself. tmpgenc will add on the borders (these borders are present on all DVDs with 2.35:1 ratios) itself.

i don't know if there are any subtitle issues with star wars.. there probably are (greedo, jabba the hutt, etc). check the 25-page star wars thread in "advanced conversion" for help on that..

-Mark