letterboxing widescreen clips- newbie question

[vix]

I have a few video clips (mpg, avi, mov) I'd like to put on a dvd. Problem is the clips are at different aspect ratios. The 4/3 ones can remain as is. But I have some wide screen captures that distorts into 4/3 when I encode them in toast. Is there a simple way to achieve this? To letterbox the wide screen captures so that they wouldnt distort?

I have QT Pro, Toast Titanium and a few of the downloadable utilities. I'm running OS 10.39 on a single processor G5

I'm a virgin newbie so if anyone can help me or direct me to a thread where this was discusse, I'd be grateful.

[vix]

can anyone give me another site i could go to that would be able to help me?

[Case]

Not sure what your problem is. When I drop a 576x240 widescreen AVI on Toast’s DVD-Video window, it gets letterboxed by Toast’s encoder.

[alph]

As long as your clips/movies can play in Quicktime Toast should be able to encode them. Toast's encoder is quite decent both in terms of quality and speed, but Toast has improved in many ways in recent versions so make sure you have the latest version, 6.1.1 is current.

I've seen Toast get "confused", for lack of a better term, when you try and make it encode slightly different sizes and formats at 1 time. It might be worth trying to encode the problematic videos/clips individually to see it if helps. At "standard" video quality, Toast will let you put a total of about 2 hours on 1 DVD, but if you can always re-compress with Popcorn or something afterwards.

To recap:
-Use Toast's video tab to encode your videos/clips 1 by 1 by saving as Disc image.
-Mount each disc image and recover the Vobs
-Re-author the Vobs to a single DVD.
-Re-compress with Popcorn or alike if total size is greater than 1 disc.

Not a 100% guarantee this will work, but from my experience it would be worth a shot. Alternately, take the plunge and discover FFMPEGX for your encoding needs and you can use Toast to author you discs.

Alph

[vix]

thanks for the help.But the problem still exsiists
i have a few 625x274px mpg file that i want letterboxed in toast, but when i encode it toast distorts it into a 4/3 ratio. how can is force to to not do that?

[alph]

I misunderstood your original post to some degree. I think the use of the word "distort" lead me down the wrong path. From what you are saying Toast is changing your aspect ratio to 4:3 by adding letterboxing, but it's not distorting the image per say, or is it really?

Your video has an aspect ratio of 2.28. 16:9 is 1.78 and 4:3 is 1.33. From what I gather Toast will respect the original aspect ratio if it's either 1.33 or 1.78. Otherwise it defaults to letterboxing to 4:3.

To letterbox your 2.28 to 16:9 NTSC you need the image to be 720x368 with letterboxing of 56 both top and bottom, and for your video to be 4:3 NTSC you need an image of 720x288 with letterboxing of 96 both top and bottom. (This is using multiples of 16)

Your best bet, unless I've missed some hidden aspect ratio feature in Toast, would be to convert your movie to mpeg using something like FFMPEGX, and then author with Toast. At that point Toast will only remux your mpegs and author the disc without re-encoding.

Alph

[Spoffo]

I think you're talking about something much simpler - if your problem is only that the clips that were recorded as widescreen come out "squished" and the 4:3s look normal, here's all you have to do:

1) Run the whole (planned) disk through Toast, but save it as a disk image. Or, if you've already burned a disk that's good in all other respects, but just has certain clips looking squished, put that disk in your Mac.

2) Copy the complete VIDEO_TS folder from the image (or the burned disk) to your hard disk.

3) Change the privileges on the VIDEO_TS and on all the files in it from read only to read & write. (That's why you copied it to the hard disk, you can't have write access to files in a disk image)

4) Now, open this VIDEO_TS folder with MyDVDEdit. Highlight each title set in the upper left window. For each of the squished ones, click the "IFO" button on the lower big window and change the aspect ratio, which probably says "4:3", to "16:9 auto letterbox" using the pulldown. Leave the ones that are supposed to be 4:3 alone.

5. When you're finished, save the changes and burn the VIDEO_TS using Toast. This disk will play just like the last one except that the titles that were recorded as widescreen will play letterboxed.

[vix]

thanks spoffo, that's absolutely brilliant.

I'm going to try it now.

thanks again