COnverting an MPEG to VCD and removing Borders

[fccolon]

Hi All,

Bit of (meaning a lot of) a newb at this malarky, so apologies if I'm asking an obvious question.

I have a movie that was originally in 21:9 format, that has been converted to 4:3 at 470x576. I ran this through the Panasonic mpeg encoder and burned to VCD switching it to 16:9 and that all seemed to go fine, and plays ok on my widescreen telly.
Now, the 4:3 conversion has put black borders top/bottom. Is there a way to remove these borders ? What should I do a search on to find the info for myself..I've tried edit Border removal in various configurations and not understood/got what seemed to be relevant topics.
Also what res. is best for PAL 16:9

Thanks for taking the time to reply, this has been sending me

[Gazorgan]

You are mixing your Metaphors so to speak. And several things you stated are not DVD complient.

So, having said that. To convert a 16:9 to 4:3 is pretty straight forward. You tell your MPEG2 encoder your source is 16:9 and you want your output to be 4:3. 16:9 and 4:3 don't have anything to do with the resolution per se'. 720x576 can be 4:3, 16:9, or Anamorphic. As far as resolution goes, it's up to you how you re-size. Generally speaking, you chop some of the sides of before re-sizing to deal with skinny/fat displays caused by 16:9 encoding.

16:9 is an invalid DAR for 1/2 D1 resolution. Most players will handle it, but most authoring applications won't accept it. There are work arounds.

Of all the MPEG2 encoders out there, I've never used the panasonic version. CCE/TMPGEnc/Mainconcept are more than enough to do anyuthing for me.