DV to XviD Question

[Robert Simandl]

I've seen the guides here that show you how to do DV to XviD conversions, but they all refer to actual camcorder footage.

I have some letterboxed TV shows (Battlestar Galactica, etc) that are in DV format because I captured them with a Canopus ADVC-100.

I'd like to crop the black bars at the top and bottom, do an IVTC, and encode as 16x9 XviD.

Can someone fill me in on the best software for this, and the best way to do it?

Thanks...

[redwudz]

I use VirtualDub Mod for that, but the regular VD will work as well. You need to add a DV codec. The Panasonic DV codec works for me. I'm not really knowledgeable about IVTC, but if your video is DV at 29.970, I'm not so sure you would need that. But others would know more on that. The cropping could be done in VD easy enough.

For 16:9 in the Xvid codec, 'Configure>Profile@Level>more>Aspect Ratio. But read the note there. Some players will ignore that flag.

I save out the audio as a WAV after editing, then use ffmpeggui to convert it to AC3 to add in later when authoring. I also frameserve the output of the VDM edit directly to TMPGEnc and encode only the video to MPEG-2. This saves hard drive space and time.