mpeg2 (4:3) to avi (16:9)

[kouras]

Hello, Ive done a bit of research and found that theres no way to resize a 4:3 video to 16:9 widescreen without cropping it? Is this true?

the source video is 704 x 576, if I just resize it to 704 x 480 - the picture is still a bit "fat", if you know what I mean.

thanks

[manono]

You can add black bars to the right and left sides followed by a resize to make it 16:9 (or resize followed by adding black bars). That's commonly done when the video is a mix of "fullscreen" and "widescreen" sources, like documentaries sometimes. But that's probably not what you had in mind. So yes, to convert it to 16:9, ordinarily you crop from the top and bottom and resize.

[kouras]

You can add black bars to the right and left sides followed by a resize to make it 16:9 (or resize followed by adding black bars). That's commonly done when the video is a mix of "fullscreen" and "widescreen" sources, like documentaries sometimes. But that's probably not what you had in mind. So yes, to convert it to 16:9, ordinarily you crop from the top and bottom and resize.

ok, thanks for your answer....thats a shame, to crop that much from top and bottom I need to check first if theres anything important in that area I'm cropping now, will test how it looks on HDTV.

[manono]

You could always watch it the way it was created and intended to be watched. On a widescreen TV set that would be with the pillar bars on the sides of a 1.33:1 video. Then you wouldn't have to go through the trouble of butchering the video and creating a much inferior copy.