Widescreen SVCD has grey letterbox

[johnells]

I just created an SVCD from a widescreen 2.35:1 movie. I choose 16:9 525 Lines NTSC for the aspect ratio. When view the SVCD I noticed on my 4:3 TV that there are two sets of letterboxes. One creating a 16:9 letter box and one a 2.35:1 letterbox. The 16:9 letterbox is dark grey and the 2:35:1 letterbox is pure black. Other than that the image looks excellent and with correct aspect.

I can ignore the gray but I just want to make sure I did not mess up a setting during the encode. and suggestions?

John

PS: My TV is calibrated for black levels.

[scottrempel]

I have a 4:3 TV and when do a widescreen movie I set the source aspect ratio 16:9 and the aspect ratio under the video tab (in Tmpg) to 4:3. I then use clip frame to cut away all the black bar on the movie and selcet "keep aspect ratio" under the advanced tab. This gives me really nice pure black bars. I know what that gray bar stuff looks like as I had that problem with my first movie. Not very attractive!

[johnells]

Jeeze Louise you would think that they could make this a little easier no? I mean why don't they just give you an anamorphic option instead of this clipping crap. And selecting 4:3 for the aspect ratio makes no sense if I have a widescreen TV.

There must be a simple way to encode the original 720 x 480 anamorphic MPEG2 frames to 480 x 480 anamorphic MPEG2 frames. I mean the DVD player will stretch the original from 1.5:1 to 2.35:1 so it looks normal. It must be able to stretch from 1:1 to 2.35 as well.

John

[scottrempel]

What the clip frame does is give you the nice solid black color. If you don't clip frame the encoding makes the solid black that greyish color. I only have a 4:3 TV so I have no problems although I have no idea what I would do if I was switching between that and a widescreen TV. There must be a better way but I just don't know. Hope you figure it out!

[johnells]

It was my understanding that anamorphic DVD's do not store black bars. The full 480/525 lines are used for the video frame. The black bars are added by the DVD player. So Why is TMPGENC creating any bars at all. Is it becasue SVCD's are not treated the same way as DVD's in the DVD player?

Does anyone know if SVCD's support the ASPECT ratio setting in DVD players?

John

[VidGuy]

It's very easy to encode 16:9 to 16:9 anamorphic with TMPGEnc - just set both the source and target aspect ratio to 16:9.

It is NOT TRUE that anamoprhic DVDs do not store black bars.
They only do not store black bars if the movie's aspect ratio is exactly 16:9.

A move that is 2.35:1 will have black bars.

This is because DVD players convert Anamorphic to letterbox by scaling the picture down to convert form 16:9 to 4:3. (Yes, it's true that a "true" anamorphic video will not have any black bars. However, DVD players only really support a 16:9 anamorphic).

Look at it another way - to convert a letterboxed video to today's anamorphic, you scale it vertically by 125% then clip off the extra. If the original was 16:9, this exactly clips off the black bars. If the original was "skinnier" than 16:9, then there is still some black bars left.

Until DVD players can vertically stretch by some factor other than 125%, anamorphic 1.85 and 2.35:1 movies will have black bars encoded on them.

DVD players normally only do a couple of stretches - 480 -> 720 and 352 -> 720 for the horizontal. 1.25:1 for the 16:9 to 4:3 conversion, and 2:1 for the 240 -> 480 conversion in the vertical.

SVCDs do not support automatically setting the aspect ratio - you will have to manually set your player to play an anamorphic SVCD at the proper ratio.

[johnells]

Thanks for the lesson. Now I have to go and digest this.

Since 2.35 movies have black bars stored on the disk then how many lines of "real" resolution are there?

Does 363 sound right for 2.35 content?

Does 461 sound right for 1.85 content?

And on a 1.3 TV you would have 272 lines for 2.35 content?

And on a 1.3 TV you would have 346 lines for 1.85 content?

And on a 1.3 TV you would have 360 lines for 1.78 content?

John

[VidGuy]

Yeah - those numbers look about right.