MiniDV 4:3 to 16:9

[yronnen]

Hi,

I have a few 4:3 mini-dv tapes and I want to convert the video to 16:9 (I know some areas may be lost). Is there a way to do the conversion while transfering the video to the PC via firewire? If not, what software can help me with that? I want to do the conversion on the original avi-dv files so I won't lose quality.

Any solutions are welcomed, either free or commercial.

Thanks.

[guns1inger]

I don't know of any nive way to do it during transfer, and I would probably recommend that you don't. There are two parts to the conversion. You first have to crop the video, then you have to resize it. For NTSC you have to crop a total of 120 lines from the video. This is usually done by taking 60 from the top and 60 from the bottom. The video then needs to be resized back to 480 pixels high.

For the PAL the theory is the same, but the numbers are 72 from the top and 72 from the bottom, then resize back to 576.

This can be done in virtualdub, then frameserved to your encoder, or better yet, avisynth. Both are free.

The issue with taking this approach is that is it very simplistic, and ignores the actual content of the video. As the video was most likely shot with the full 4:3 frame, doing a simple crop may result in people losing heads, or key areas of interest in the frame simply disappearing.

Have a read of this post -> https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=300597 for more details, scripts etc.