Can I Crop 4:3 to 16:9

[imthewalrus79]

Sorry if this has been discussed on the forum before; but I didn't find the answer in my searching. But I was wondering if there is any program that will crop video that was captured in 4:3 to make it 16:9. I've tried a couple that have stretched the 4:3 video to a 16:9 image. But I'm looking for something that will actually cut the top and bottom of the 4:3 image to make the 16:9 image. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Kevin

[olyteddy]

What format?

[guns1inger]

NTSC crop 60 pixels from the top and bottom (120 in total), then resize back to 480 vertical.

PAL crop 72 pixels from the top and bottom (144 in total) and resize to 576 vertical.

Virtualdub or avisynth can do this easily.

However this is a straight crop, so if the video wasn't framed for 16:9 you could find people losing the tops of their heads etc.

[wwaag]

Another option is to import your 4:3 footage into an application like Premiere or Vegas in which you set your project as 16:9. At this point you will see the black side bars. Then using the position and scaling functions you can go through your footage and control what part of the image is to be expanded. In this way you can avoid the potential problem of cut-off heads. The down-side is that it takes time and, more importantly, that you'll lose resolution. I've got a lot of 4:3 video footage that I display on a 65" Mitusbishi TV, so loss of resolution is to be avoided. Hence, I usually just accept the black side bars, although in some of my current projects, I use an overlay of side "stage curtains" to fill the black space.

One advantage of either accepting the black sides bars or adding a video overlay is that you actually see more of the horizontal since now there is no overscan in that dimension.

An even easier solution, especially if you've got a lot of 4:3 footage, is to use a DVD player that can insert the side bars and incrementally zoom. Most DVD players simply "expand" a 4:3 image to 16:9 and then you have to use one of your TV's stretch modes which always look terrible, especially for home video. I've got a Panasonic which has a mode wherein black side bars will be inserted for 4:3 footage so that the proper aspect is maintained. If you feel the side bars are too large (which are actually fairly small), then you can incrementally zoom. I've found roughly 110% to be a good compromise. Only the smallest side bar and not much shrinkage in the vertical. The point is, you can play with it to suit you own taste. I've got about 70 home video DVDs, so use of a DVD player to do this conversion is a lot simpler than re-editing those to 16:9 so that they will display properly with most DVD players.

Hope this helps.

wwaag

[thefiddler]

Another option is to import your 4:3 footage into an application like Premiere or Vegas in which you set your project as 16:9. At this point you will see the black side bars. Then using the position and scaling functions you can go through your footage and control what part of the image is to be expanded. In this way you can avoid the potential problem of cut-off heads. The down-side is that it takes time and, more importantly, that you'll lose resolution... Hence, I usually just accept the black side bars, although in some of my current projects, I use an overlay of side "stage curtains" to fill the black space.
One advantage of either accepting the black sides bars or adding a video overlay is that you actually see more of the horizontal since now there is no overscan in that dimension.

If you're converting 4:3 to 16:9 with black bars (or curtains) on either side, you're loosing significant vertical resolution even if you've kept the horizontal. 4:3 and 16:9 (at least for DV) use the same resolution of 720x480. 4:3 just squeezes each vertical column of pixels to .9 (so each pixel measures 1x0.9), while 16:9 stretches each vertical column to 1.2 (so each pixel measures 1x1.2). If you're taking 4:3 video and encoding it at 16:9, you've kept the 480 horizontal scanlines, but lost a significant portion of the horizontal resolution. What used to be 720 pixels ends up being about 540 (90 lost on either side to blackness or curtains). So much for avoiding resolution loss. Your last suggestion of letting the hardware just display 4:3 as 4:3 (with unused areas on either side) made a whole lot more sense.

Back to the original question though. He wants to know how to make 4:3 into 16:9. He's already got 4:3, he wants 16:9. In that case, your original suggestion of using the Pan/Crop features of an editor like Vegas is by far the best and easiest option. And if the video is good video, most good NLE's have a good image resizer that will still produce pretty good 16:9 from a croped and resized portion of 4:3.

[imdaman]

Can some also help me too? I got this mpeg that is 16/9, i encode it using Xvid codec using Vdub but it crops it to 4/3, how do i change it to make it 16/9?