Hi there all.

What I do is capture a lot of video - which comes through 4:3 (and is often letterboxed). My monitor is widescreen so I prefer not to keep a letterboxed 4:3 capture in 4:3 ratio for my final output (that leaves me with a video in the centre of the screen with black bars (vertical & horizontal). Initially what I'd do is crop the horizontal bars and resize down to the nearest multiple of 16. But this often produced random aspect ratios and someone mentioned to me that my dimensions were off.
Now I've been cropping to a common ratio (i.e. 16:9 / 2.35:1 - depending on how the video is). But sometimes when I crop to 16:9, for example, it cuts off quite a bit of the video (obviously it isn't exactly letterboxed to 16:9). It isn't really preferred to cut off part of the video, but then to keep within standard ratios, I do it anyway.

Let me put it into a practical example (please note, I do everything in VirtualDub - except audio editing)
  • I capture a video with a resolution of 768x576 using huffyuv compression - it is in 4:3 format
  • I crop off the top and bottom and do a resize and get a resolution of 768x480 (for this example) which is a 16:10 or 1.600 aspect ratio - this is good in that I get a full picture on my monitor which is 16:10. The problem is that the output is now non-standard.

The above is the method I used to use, and the output aspect ratio varied depending on how much needed to be cropped off.
Below is how I've currently been going about it - let's say same video:
  • Capture video: 768x576
  • Resize video as follows - compute from 4:3 and crop to 16:9 -- multiples of 16
The above now gives me a resolution of 768x432 which is now 16:9 but I've lost a bit of picture at the top and bottom.

What is the best option - is a non-standard aspect ratio okay - I know it's ok - it plays fine on my pc, but is it recommended or should I stick with standards?
If it's only a TV logo that's being cut to maintain the ratio - it's fine with me. But if I should cut the video - I suppose I will.

Attached image is 16:9 and video is cut/cropped beyond the black bars to give this ratio. [notice the logo on the top-left].