Star Trek 4:3 Aspect Ratio manually set to 16:9

[cowboyup910]

My original DVD's are pretty much scratch up after lending them away to friends and families. I saved all of them to my PC, but removed all but the main titles. So I'm re-encoding to DVD5 or maybe DVD9 and adding a template with titles for each episode. Most all DVD's have 4 titles and when re-encoding I saw the ability to select 16:9 wide-screen.

I know the original source is has an aspect ratio of 4:3 but I thought I could set to 16:9 to show better on my wide screen TV 42' 720p. Will doing these distort the quality, I suspect it will but thought it would be worth a shot.

[manono]

Will doing these distort the quality...

Yes, it'll make everyone look short, fat, and ugly. They'll look best on your widescreen TV in the original aspect ratio.

[cowboyup910]

What's wrong with short and fat people, lol...

Thanks for the reply, I will re-advise that project that's already in place, it would have became evident shortly. But wanted to know for sure.

Gracias!

[AlanHK]

Very bad idea. Even worse, some releases of old shows crop off the top and bottom of the screen to give a fake widescreen aspect. So everyone loses their hats and chins in closeups.

Some TVs have a distortion effect that stretches the edges of the image while leaving the centre normal; this is the best way if you really must have widescreen. And it can be turned off.

The recent "remastered" Star Trek have brilliant sharp colour, rescanned from the original 35mm film. Much better quality than was ever seen before. Some hardcore fans complain about the redone effects, but that's a very small percentage of the show. But they very deliberately did not try to change the framing or aspect ratio.

[cowboyup910]

Thanks, I'm working on the TNG series. It sounds like it will never be in HD or remastered like TOS, so I'm trying to preserve mine as best as possible with a little customization.

So sad; TNG is and will always be the best of Star Trek!

[filmboss80]

So sad; TNG is and will always be the best of Star Trek!

No! Shatner rules!

[wulf109]

DVDrebuilder can convert 4:3 to 16:9.I've used it on some TV series. The effect varies but is reasonable on the Star Trek series.

[jman98]

Thanks, I'm working on the TNG series. It sounds like it will never be in HD or remastered like TOS, so I'm trying to preserve mine as best as possible with a little customization.

So sad; TNG is and will always be the best of Star Trek!

It's not impossible for TNG to be in HD, but we've had threads before about it. It was not shot on film like TOS was. This is one of the problems. The special effects were done in a money saving way that made them fairly low resolution and they will need a lot of work to not look like crap in HD. I believe edDV had some interesting info on this in the thread about it. Similar issues surround all Star Trek series from TNG on with the exception of Enterprise.

To each his own and while I liked all the various Star Trek series, I will simply say that I personally disagree that TNG was the best of them all.

[filmboss80]

Actually, I had a similar situation with DVD sets I had purchased of the '60s TV series "The Invaders." I wanted to make Xvid backups to watch on my Philips portable while traveling, but that particular player would stretch everything to 16:9, regardless of aspect ratio flags, unless I went through a series of set-up steps to manually set the aspect ratio.

So, when encoding to Xvid, I ran the shows through VirtualDub, doing half-crop/half-pillarbox compromise while encoding to a 16:9 frame. (Instead of removing 120 lines, I only cropped 60--more from the bottom than the top--and resized back to 720x480, adding much narrower pillarbox bars to the sides than would have been seen with a completely 4:3 source.)

Of course, this reduced resolution and quality, but I was watching it on an 8" screen. It actually worked very well.

That's always an option.