Letterbox 4:3 to Anamorphic 16:9

[sjdean]

I've done several Google Searches but never quite found the exact or best answer so thought I'd throw it out to the expert.

I have some letterbox 4:3 video clips. Obviously on a widescreen TV unless you zoom in, you get bars down the left and right of the screen. Not very suitable.

So I'd quite like to convert to proper anamorphic 16:9 video.

The video source is 4:3 Interlaced MPEG2 PAL video which is letterboxed. I can do a simple clip/crop procedure which then resizes the vertical element of the picture (ie from cropped 432 back to 720) in the basic MPEG but then plays back in the correct aspect on the TV.

Unfortunately when i do this, the quality is pretty poor. Im guessing that's because the video is initially stretched by the encoding process then shrunk again by the TV.

I was hoping I may just be able to crop the video and have the TV display whatever is presented, but I don't think it's as easy as that is it?

Maybe my current editor, TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 isn't very good, unfortunately it's the best I know of. Perhaps there are some other tips or suggestions, or perhaps other software I can use.

I primarily need something to do the following tasks:

Multiplex/Demultiplex Audio and Video Streams
Transcode Video/Audio to a Quality/Speed as good as TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 or better - should have specific controls over Audio and Video bitrate eg setting target bitrates. Should be fairly fast.
Cropping/Resizing
Other features such as on screen graphics, scene joining, soundtrack editing welcome - but some of the sound track things I've seen are a little bit lacking.

Any thoughts?

[Baldrick]

You are doing it correct, crop and then must you upresize to 720x480/576. And as you notice you will lose quality and the reconversion also affects the quality. You can't do much to improve the method, you can't just crop as that would make the resolution non dvd compliant. Maybe you can try use some filters using avisynth and be sure use as high video bitrate as possible.

[MOVIEGEEK]

You will get a better picture by zooming, believe me.

[sjdean]

Even tried VirtualDub MPEG2 without success. Oh well, back to zooming it is. Seems such a cheat though.

Well can anyone recommend any other video programs for Multiplex/Demultiplex and Transcoding of a comparable if not better quality and speed than TMPGEnc?

My budget would be about £100. I tried the latest TMPGenc trials, but they didn't inspire me. I was having a look at Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 14.

Ta
Simon

[manono]

If your source is really interlaced, then there are 2 reasons why the result looks like crap:
1. You can't just crop and resize an interlaced source. You have to do it in an interlace-aware manner. You destroyed the field structure doing it the way you did. Again, this assumes a true interlaced source (you can see the combing).
2. As said, doing this isn't such a good idea to begin with because the resolution just isn't there in the 4:3 source. As MOVIEGEEK says, you'll get (the same or) better results by using the zoom.

Well can anyone recommend any other video programs for Multiplex/Demultiplex and Transcoding of a comparable if not better quality and speed than TMPGEnc?

1. Multiplex - Muxman (for DVD). ImagoMPEG-Muxer for MPEG.
2. Demux - PGCDemux. Demux is demux, so it's pretty much the same. But it's for DVD only. DGIndex can demux MPEG clips.
3. Transcode - HCEnc. Better and faster. You need AviSynth, though (usually).

All free.