Changing Widescreen Divx...

[pookieguy]

Hello there...
Dunno if this is possible, but I'll mention it anyways.

I would like to change the aspect ratio of a Divx (currently in Widescreen) to be able to see the full movie and not have it cut off on the sides due to the Widescreen display...
Is there anyway to do this?
I've attempted this with TMPGenc converting it to VCD but it still displays as Widescreen.

Thanks,

[BillyB]

What you basically want to do is crop the sides so the center part of the frame becomes fullscreen. Sort of taboo with film buffs, but it can make the video more watchable. You lose the video on the sides of course, but that's the price you pay.

There's several ways to do it.
Load the divx into TMPG. Click SETTINGS then the ADVANCED tab. Doubleclick on the selection called CLIP FRAME. Crop the top and sides to get it to the size you want and click OK. What you're looking for is a 352x240 framesize or an aspect ratio equal to that.

Or.. open your DivX in TMPGEnc and LOAD the encoding settings for the format template for output (probaly VideoCD NTSC.mcf). Now click the SETTING button at the bottom of TMPGEnc and choose the ADVANCED tab. In the section called VIDEO ARRANGE METHOD choose NO MARGIN (keep aspect ratio). If the movie was encoded to DivX WITHOUT black bars at the top and bottom this should work. IF the black bars ARE included in the video, there will be no crop effect or it won't look good.

Or you could edit it in VirtualDub...
*note - always mark out a small piece of DivX and do a direct stream copy then use that sample to set up the processing. At 3hrs per DivX or MPEG conversion, you want to get things right BEFORE processing the entire file.

Cropping in virtualdub. It's time consuming but worth the effort if you need to apply multiple filters or edit the movie. Open your DivX movie in VDub and choose FILTERS in the VIDEO section at the top. Click ADD and choose the NULL TRANSFORM filter then click the CROPPING button. Adjust the X and Y crop points to get rid of the black at the top and bottom first then really pull in the X offset on each side to cut off the sides. This is trial and error to get it right, but the key points are to adjust each direction evenly and to shoot for a 4:3 aspect ratio. I'd also suggest keeping the offset values in multiples of 4,8 or 16 since this will give better video compression.

You can also add the RESIZE filter if you want and size it to 352 x 240 to see what it looks like. This is what will happen when you make it into a MPEG later, so it's an option to do the resize now. I usually choose bicubic for the resize by the way, but all of what I'm talking about is trial and error, so just play around.

The big problem with this is that you now need to do FULL processing on the video of the DivX file. Audio can stay on direct stream copy or be changed to NO COMPRESSION (my suggestion). I'd suggest setting the DivX video compression to the same (format & bitrate)as what the file had originally or slightly higher (choose file->information in Vdub). All you want to do is basically do a direct stream copy with the filter active. Cranking up the bitrate isn't going to improve the source DivX quality but setting the compression too low will lower the quality of your final VCD. I'd also suggest marking out the first half of the movie and saving as part1 and then mark out the second part and save as part2 since most movies won't fit on a single CDR.

There might be a better way of doing this of course, and I'd love to hear it. I've used these methods on a few movies so far though, and it's worked out well.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BillyB on 2002-01-15 01:58:46 ]</font>

[LordPython]

Hello there...
Dunno if this is possible, but I'll mention it anyways.

I would like to change the aspect ratio of a Divx (currently in Widescreen) to be able to see the full movie and not have it cut off on the sides due to the Widescreen display...
Is there anyway to do this?
I've attempted this with TMPGenc converting it to VCD but it still displays as Widescreen.

Thanks,

My problem is just the opposeite. I have a widescreen AVI and I'm trying to convert it into two MPG files, however it squishes it into full screen. I REALLY don't want this, how do I tell TMPGEnc to keep the original framesize?

[kjmacke]

If you want fullscreen but not the squish or egghead look just select the no margin tab. This how ever will cut the sides off but you have full screen.