using virtualdub mpeg-2 for cropping and need advice

[mrgain]

I have some mpeg2 footage that I captured in 720x480 resolution and 4x3 aspect ratio for dvd.This is going to be viewed on a widescreen tv and I want to crop the sides of the footage to make it look clean.I read that using "virtualdub mpeg-2" is a good tool for doing this but I'm new to this stuff and need some advice.Am I correct in assuming that the top and bottom edges of the image will be hidden on widescreen just like they would be on 4x3 television?The reason I ask is I'm doing these for someone and I cant test them on their wide tv and I dont have widescreen.Should I also use a resize filter to make this look good and if so do I put the original 720x480 demensions in the "new heigth and width boxes" and not the cropped demensions?It has to be cropped in equal increments of 16 correct?What about "expand frame and letterbox image should I use this selection and if so what should my frame width or frame heigth be?

[juniper]

I have some mpeg2 footage that I captured in 720x480 resolution and 4x3 aspect ratio for dvd.This is going to be viewed on a widescreen tv and I want to crop the sides of the footage to make it look clean.I read that using "virtualdub mpeg-2" is a good tool for doing this but I'm new to this stuff and need some advice.Am I correct in assuming that the top and bottom edges of the image will be hidden on widescreen just like they would be on 4x3 television?The reason I ask is I'm doing these for someone and I cant test them on their wide tv and I dont have widescreen.Should I also use a resize filter to make this look good and if so do I put the original 720x480 demensions in the "new heigth and width boxes" and not the cropped demensions?It has to be cropped in equal increments of 16 correct?What about "expand frame and letterbox image should I use this selection and if so what should my frame width or frame heigth be?

I have used the resize filter to change 5:4 frame ratio to 4:3 with cropping to maintain a correct video ratio. For example to go from 600x480 to 640x480, it is necessary to crop 15 pixels from both the top and bottom of the frame. Then the 600x480 video fills a 4:3 video display in reasonably correct proportions.

So if you want to avoid both the pillars and the alternative "fat" picture, it seems you might want to crop the top and bottom to compensate for the streached picture.

[guns1inger]

Crop 60 lines from the top and 60 from the bottom, then resize back to 480. Frameserve to your mpeg2 encoder and encode as 16:9 and author as 16:9.

Of course this is a crude method that just simply crops off 25% of the image area without regard for the content. You may find you are chopping off heads.