capturing widescreen

[odiedog]

Hey I’m not new to encoding but I am new to capturing. I just got a widescreen tv and I want to convert all my hi 8 videos to dvd and would like for them to be in widescreen. What is the best way to capture so that it is widescreen? Is this a setting that needs to be specified in the capture set up or when I’m converting avi to mpeg? I’ve captured one video but when I convert it from avi to mpeg I choose the 16.9 ratio but all that does is shrink down the picture. Sorry if this is a stupid question. I just cant figure this out. Thanks.

[Baldrick]

I guess your source hi8 is 4:3, then must you crop or else will you get wrong aspect ratio....and it's not really worth it....learn to live with black borders. .

[guns1inger]

Are your HI-8s shot in 16:9 or 4:3 ?

If they are 4:3 then you will have to capture them as 4:3. You can then decide how to process them. Your choices are

a) leave them as is. This is, IMO, the best option

b) encode them as 16:9, with black bars up the sides to fill out the frame. They will present as a 4:3 image in the centre of your screen, as they would if you left them encoded as 4:3.

c) Crop them down to a 16:9 frame. this would involve cropping 120 lines of image (usually done as 60 from the top and 60 from the bottom), then resizing back up to 480 lines and encoding as 16:9

The issue with option c) is that generally, when people shoot video with a 4:3 camera, they try to fill the frame. When you then try to crop for 16:9, you find you are cutting off heads or big chunks of faces etc because the footage was not shot for cropping. You can sometimes get around this if you crop in an editor, and slowly go through the footage using keyframes to reframe the image withing the new 16:9 border, but this is a time consuming exercise.