How does adding borders increase quality?

[chodges84]

sorry if ne of this sounds stupid, but bear with me.

this has puzzled me for a while. All the better quality films I have seen have had borders. So why does this improve the quality? The only thing I can think of is that this leaves more bitrate for the film in the middle of the borders. This is the only thing that has ever puzzled me.

Also how do I add borders to my videos.

Also are all vcds 10mb per minute even if it is ntsc film? (i ahve heard this is less)

Regards,
Craig

[Truman]

VCD is always about 10 MB per minute, no matter whether NTSC or PAL.
http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcd.htm
Well, if you have a widescreen source and add pure black borders, you will end with a smaller framesize, i.e. more bits per pixel / macroblock. The higher the bitrate, the better the visual quality.
E.g. 16:9 source to 4:3 = 448x224 pixel =392 macroblocks
4:3 source to 4:3 = 448X300 pixel =525 macroblocks
Less macroblocks to encode but the bitrate is constant, so of course the widescreen will look better.

[inframan]

If the source was VHS it probably had some distortion on the bottom and the bottom lines were copped so the ecoder wouldn't waste time trying to clean that area up.

I've read that even if the edge is already cropped you should recrop the same area to cover the noise along the edge of the video.