Creating 16:9 format

[jgandara]

I was wondering if you can create 16:9 video format from a 4:3 video. How would you do that?, during capture or editing the video?
Does virtualdub has an option to resize the video? or while encoding to mpeg2 you can do that effect using the film template.

Please give me your input and experience!

[Tolwyn]

I guess I don't understand the question.

4:3 will look S T R E T C H E D in 16:9.

You can shrink, pad, and frameserve it out for encoding, but then it will just be a 4:3 movie encapsulated to "fit" the 16:9 aspect.

?

[Gazorgan]

No.

[vcddude]

Yes indeed you can do this, but you need to crop the source video and then encode it with the 16x9 aspect ratio flag enabled. Here's how I do it (I do this to convert older non-anamorphic DVDs to anamorphic DVDs for my widescreen TV) -- this is really easy with TMPGEnc but is doable with CCE using AVISynth and also easy in ProCoder Express:

Assuming the source video is 720x480 (DVD) AVI:
- Crop 60 lines from the top
- Crop 60 lines from the bottom
- Encode to DVD MPEG2 (720x480) with 16x9 aspect ratio enabled

That's it. The only drawback is that the final picture will not include everything from the original picture (you just cropped it out) and it will not be as clear as the original since you are essentially re-encoding a 740x360 picture to a 740x480 picture, but it looks fine to my eyes.

vcddude

[jgandara]

In premiere (demo) I saw the option to capture 16:9; also I think all Sony camcorders have an option to select cinema (16:9) size. I'm just wondering how does that work?

[subigo]

In premiere (demo) I saw the option to capture 16:9; also I think all Sony camcorders have an option to select cinema (16:9) size. I'm just wondering how does that work?

The same way... the camera just crops the screen and doesnt use all that it could. To get true 16:9 you need a prosumer level camera with true 16:9, or a widescreen lens.

[jgandara]

thx, I see that unless you have a real 16:9 source, it's not worth it to do the conversion. I was thinking that maybe some HD TVs will like more the 16:9 format than 4:3