Should I bother cropping the black borders on 2.35:1 DVD's?

[guitar_george_skank]

I've started using FitCD to calculate my resize options and have noticed that if I crop the black borders on the 2.35:1 DVD (PAL) source i.e. the film pixel size is 720 (or whatever) x 432 (instead of 576) then i get much more bitrate per pixel. Then I thought that I might get the same results anyway, even if I did not crop because it is just black borders which would not take up any bitrate anyway.

Is this the case or should I continue to crop for a 2.35:1 source?

GGS.

[djethan]

Crop, by all means, as long as your final product has the right aspect ratio. The black may not take up much, but it does take SOME room. You can save several megs cropping.