Easy way to add widescreen bars?

[axlish]

Is there a freeware option for adding widescreen bars to give some of my videos a little more of a professional look? I looked around and connot find what I am looking for. Thanks.

[Baldrick]

virtualdub or virtualdubmpeg2

but adding borders requires that you reencode your video.

[guns1inger]

Or you could crop and resize to make it pseudo 16:9 anamorphic

[axlish]

Or you could crop and resize to make it pseudo 16:9 anamorphic

Can I also do this with virtualdub?

[AlecWest]

FWIW, I recently bought the 5-DVD "Godfather" collection. Sadly, I didn't rent it first. The only reason I wanted to buy it was so I could edit the first two films and recompose it in chronological order (like the Godfather Epic VHS set that came out briefly in the 1980s). And, someone here told me that the collection DVDs included all deleted scenes ... which I also wanted to add to my recomposed version.

Well, the set DOES include all deleted scenes. Unfortunately, the first two films are shot in 16x9 and the deleted scenes are all pan/scan (sigh).

So later, when I have the time, I'm going to "attempt" to use VirtualDubMPEG to create a pseudo anamorphic frame - and can hopefully keep the main action of the deleted scenes in that frame - frameserving it back to MPEG2 using TMPGenc Plus. That way, the deleted scenes should (knock on wood) fit seamlessly within the finished edit. The only good thing about this task is I'd only have to do it once (sigh).