Anime DVD Precreation - AVI Quality/Sizing Question

[tchristensen81]

Recently I purchased my burner with the intent, believe it or not, of making unlicensed Anime into DVDs as opposed to burning DVDs. Problem is when I encode it with Power Producer (which I am a bit preferable to) it doesn't size right with my screen, it cuts the edges off, seeing as this anime has subtitles on the top and bottom, which it cuts in half, this won't work. Doing a bit of research I discovered that normally a 3% to 5% border is required. So I opened VirtualDub to do so, using the resizing method with the letterbox option I created exactly what I intended to. But now I find myself with a final delimma. In VirtualDub I need to reencode the video and I worried of a loss of quality, but the basic AVIs are far too large. I used Adobe Premiere (which crashes if I try to manipulate these clips) to get the specs... which follow.

What I really need is a way to either author the DVDs with this border, some kind of quick encode, or how do I use DivX (or any decent codec really, cept Xvid, my computer hates Xvid since I reformated) to get these settings with no quality loss when I reencode with a compressor.

Here are the Video Specs. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm very new to this, this forum has been helpful to me, but this is the biggest reason I wanted a burner.

File Path: D:\Naruto DVD\01.avi
File Size: 178.05MB bytes
Total Duration: 0:23:01:23
Average Data Rate: 131.94KB per second
Image Size: 640 x 480
Pixel Depth: 24 bits
Frame Rate: 23.98 fps

Audio: 48000 Hz - 16 bit - Stereo

AVI File details:
Contains 1 video track(s) and 1 audio track(s).

Video track 1:
Total duration is 0:23:01:23
Size is 154.86MB bytes (average frame = 5.43KB bytes)
This movie appears to have DROPPED FRAMES
There are 671 keyframes, 32463 delta frames.
There are 1 empty frames.
Frame rate is 23.98 fps
Frame size is 640 x 480
Depth is 24 bits.
Compressor: 'DIV3', DivX® 5.1 Codec

Audio track 1:
Size is 21.08MB bytes
Rate is 48000 samples/sec, stereo
Sample size is 16 bits
Compatible compressor: MPEG Layer-3 Codec
Compression ratio is 47.100:1

Additional information:
Nandub v1.0rc2

[theDruid]

You can frameserve from VirtualDub into many encoders - including TMPGEnc.

That eliminates the need to create a temporary file (which would be massive if you save it uncompressed, as you say).

There are guides on doing this - it's pretty simple really:

https://www.videohelp.com/guides?howtoselect=5%3B21

cheers,
mcdruid.

[tchristensen81]

The guide link didn't seem to be working, thing is I'm not trying to change the type of file, I have no issues with it being an AVI, I just want to add a 5% border to it and not loose any of the quality that matches the specifications I sent.

[theDruid]

In what way is the link not working?

It should open the guides page, with How to frameserve selected.

You've now said you don't mind keeping the file as an avi, but you earlier said...

What I really need is a way to either author the DVDs with this border, some kind of quick encode, or how do I use DivX (or any decent codec really, cept Xvid, my computer hates Xvid since I reformated) to get these settings with no quality loss when I reencode with a compressor.

It would seem logical to use VirtualDub to resize / add borders, then frameserve into TMPGEnc Plus (or something similar) to encode to DVD-compliant MPEG-2.

Of course, if you'd rather re-encode as a DivX, you can do that with VirtualDub too - just select DivX as your compression under video (and use a bitrate calculator to work out what bitrate you want) and remember to select full processing under video.

I suggest you look through the guides for VirtualDub.

cheers,
mcdruid.