avi converted and burned to DVD - video slightly cropped?!

[Shadowplay]

Hi there, just did my first DVD burn tonight and of course had a problem :P First here's what I did and the tools I used.

source: DivX .avi files (subtitled anime - subtitles part of the video, not separate track)
- GSpot info: 640x480 (1.33:1) [=4:3], FPS: 23.976

1) virtualdub to pull the audio out to a .wav file

2) TMPGEnc Express to encode the .avi video and the .wav audio
- used 1:1 (square pixel) as the source as I saw that setting in a guide for this.
- output: MPEG-2, NTSC, 704x480, 3:2 pulldown playback, 23.976 fps (internally 29.97 fps)
- 720:480 gave me small black bars on each side of the video so I assumed I should go with the 704 cropped resolution.

3) TMPGEnc DVD Author to make a simple menu and to create the .iso file.

4) DVD Decrypter to do the burn.

5) tested playback in my Toshiba 2100 DVD player.

The picture and sound were amazing - I couldn't believe how good that turned out. However, the video was slightly cropped. I only noticed because of the subtitles and they were *right* on the bottom of the screen. Letters like "g" were cut off. The video was wider than the TV screen so I was missing a noticable amount on each side.

Since I'm *very* new to this I'm sure this is a beginner's mistake. Where did I go wrong?

[reboot]

You should have gone with 720x480 output for TV at 4:3 on the . The black bars you see in tmpgenc aren't really there, it's just tmpgenc's window.
1:1 source on the Advanced tab, and "Keep aspect ratio 2". Tmpgenc looks after the rest, so it shows up properly on your TV.

[Shadowplay]

doh

man I wish I'd known that before LOL. Ah well, thanks for confirming my suspicion there. I'll batch encode things again tonight at 720x480 and then burn tomorrow. At least I know that quality won't be a problem and that was one of my biggest concerns at the start of all this.

Thanks again for the info.

[reboot]

Tmpgenc may not be fast, but it does do quality with the right settings.

[guns1inger]

640x480=1.33:1 only when using 1:1 pixel aspect ratio. For NTSC, the pixel aspect ratio is actually 0.90909. To maintain a true 1.33:1 AR from a 640x480 1:1 source, you need to resize it to 582x480 and live with black vertical bars, or resize to 720x480 and live with distortion.

[Shadowplay]

hmm... I'll have to see how bad the distortion is for 720x480 as that's what I'm encoding to right now.

Is there any sort of "normal" choice here? Do people generally just go with the easy 720x480 or do they go with the true 1.33:1 AR of 582:480? Guess it's just a matter of preference in the end.

Thanks for the info. Hopefully over time I'll get all these things worked out.

[mats.hogberg]

However, the video was slightly cropped. I only noticed because of the subtitles and they were *right* on the bottom of the screen. Letters like "g" were cut off. The video was wider than the TV screen so I was missing a noticable

That's called overscan and is a phenomenon common to all TV sets. They always cut some of the borders out of the visible area. Propely done, video doesn't have anything significant going on in the edges of the picture.
If you really want to see it all, you have to add some black borders arount the video, best done in VirtualDub, using the resize filter, then frameserve to TMPGEnc.

/Mats