4:3 Pal to 16:9 Pal conversion

[nemezis]

Hi,

i have a cam which i capable of recording in 4:3 and 16:9.

On my last vacation to the US i forgot to set the camcorder to 16:9
and recorded the first day in 4:3.

Now i want to make a DVD but want the entire DVD to be in 16:9.

Is there any way i can clip the DV to the 16:9 aspect? and how do i do it?

I know how to use VirtualDub, but i do not know which filters to apply. I have DVD Workshop 2 and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.

/ Sean

[ark]

First crop the 4:3 video to get aspect ratio for 16:9 (there are lots of guides here and other sites) using a suitable program. The 4:3 cropped video mpeg is then to be DAR flagged for 16:9 - free program is DVDPatcher.

[nemezis]

I need to convert to 16:9 before converting the DV to MPEG.

Otherwise i can not use filters and apply effects when editing...

[ark]

The DV captured by you can be directly cropped in Virtualdub. Go to it's help file and you will know. Or you could use the program that came with your Firewire card (could be Cyberlink Power Director) would allow you to do it. Regarding the width vs height figures in pixel, search on this site for "ASPECT".
The DAR flag would be used only in MPEG which allows pictures on the display to be stretched from what is actual present in the video.

[guns1inger]

DV can (and does) have an aspect ratio flag, and well behaved playback software will observe it.

To convert PAL from 4:3 to 16:9 you need to crop 72 pixels from the top and 72 from the bottom of the image, then resize it. This can easily be done in virtualdub or avisynth, however this is not a clever crop - it just takes the centre 16:9 frame from the 4:3 frame, and discards everything outside this. As you probably framed for 4:3, you may find you have chopped off heads once to crop. When I find myself doing this type of work, I do the cropping in an editor that allows me to keyframe the position of the original image within the new frame, so I can shift it up and down as needed to keep everything in. It takes a little more time, but produces much better results.

[tonyp12]

Use Vdubs Filter named null transform for cropping

[guns1inger]

You still have to resize after cropping vdub so you can encode to 16:9