I made this killer SVCD that just rocks in terms of quality. It was a test of the one scene from Swordfish where he has to crack the DOD encryption while the girl is servicing him. Now I can't make another one to save my life. So I am turning to this forum to ask these following questions.

What I am using:
smartripper to do the ripping <- no questions on this
dvd2avi making a project file <- 1 question on this
vfapicodec for use in virtualdub <- no questions here
virtualdub to framserve to tmpgenc <- 1 question here
tmpgenc to encode the video only <- 1 question here

Here's the scenario. The quality of the video is superb, very happy with it. The aspect ratio is what the problem is. The letter box is squeezed badly. I didn't have this problem with the first one I did. I can use PowerDVD XP to see the results on the computer before taking them over to the actual DVD player. It confirms that the AR is off. So here is my questions.

1) In DVD2AVI, I have been cropping the top and bottom off (the black bars) was follwing the guide from Flexion on VCD. BTW, VCD looks fine. Should I be cropping the picture in DVD2AVI?

2) In VirtualDub, I use smartresize to set it to 480x480 with a 4:3 AR. I also do the fit width & fit height LBX. Again this is per the guide on Flexion. It works fine for VCD, of course you have to change to 352x240. I know I have to resize it to the SVCD resolution and I think this is where I am losing my ratio at. The movie is 16:9 but I have cropped it down. Should I be doing this here?

3) Now we are framserving to TMPGEnc via virtualdub's vdr stream. I am setting everything here to 4:3 525 line NTSC, as far as source and destination movie ratio's. Is this the correct setting?

Sorry to be lengthy here. It worked once and damn it looks good. Now I can't get AR right but it sure looks good. BTW, the guide I am referring to on Flexion was for VCD and I just modified it to SVCD (Mpeg 2, resolution). Everything looks ok (for VCD)when making a VCD, but like I have said too many times above. It looks great on SVCD quality but AR is bad.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys!