Hello all,

I have a couple of fundamental encoding questions that I hoped someone could answer.

1) Is there a guide anywhere that explains when and where, in TMPG, to set the Video Stream aspect ratio, and the Output aspect ratio (on the Advanced tab), to produce a particular display for a given movie format.
E.G., if I have a 16:9 movie source and I want to end up with a letterboxed output, what settings do I use? Is there a nice little cross-reference-type table for all possible situations in some guide somewhere?

2) When is it advisable to crop your movie? I have never done this, but have ended up with viewable results. Where is it beneficial to do this, and if you do, does it reduce the resultant file size after encoding?

Thanks in advance for any feedback