Can I remove color and letterbox MPEG2 video without losing quality?

[gamgamman]

I have some video (720x480,interlaced,9559VBR) I want to remove the color and add black bars to the top and bottom of the screen without the video quality being effected. Is this going to be possible? Also, what tool(s) (hopefully free or low cost) would be best suited for this task? If this can't be accomplished without losing quality, what would be the best way to minimize quality loss? Big thanks for any advice!

[jman98]

Is it possible? Yes. To do so without effecting the video quality? IMPOSSIBLE. At best you won't notice, but you'll have to re-encode. Everytime you re-encode you lose some quality.

VirtualDubMod should have some kind of filter to drop out the color and go to black and white, but I don't know how to do it. I just know that VDM should be able to do it.

You'll need to resize the video to a smaller size and add the back bars using something like AviSynth.

[guns1inger]

VDM - first add the null transform filter, then click on Crop and crop off the section you no longer want (i.e. where your bars will be. Add a Resize filter, and keep the size to the current (cropped) size. Add borders (bottom half of the resize filter) to get back to your original resolution. Finally, add the GreyScale filter and you know have a letterboxed, black and white video.

Note : I don't resize the original video - the method above only crops and adds borders, and is therefore safe to use on interlaced footage. If you need to resize the image down to a smaller resolution then you are advised to use AVISynth to do this.

[gamgamman]

Thanks guys for the info about VDM! Seems to be able to do what I need done, I wish it had MPEG2 output but hey, you can't get everything in a free editor. I guess I will apply the effects I need, then render to avi (or frameserve) to something like tmpgenc for the final MPEG. Thanks again for the advice!