problem with aspect ratio of captured mivie

[whschlebaum]

Hi guys,

Having captured a widescreen movie from my old [4:3] TVset with my Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 capturecard, I don't know how to get rid off the black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen. Stripping the black bars by clipping the image into a sort of quasi 16:9 format with TMPGenc [by subtracting a few top- and bottom lines] does not seem to be the right option, for this distorts the whole picture. The problem is not to force an original 4:3 movie into a widescreen outlook, but to restore a widescreen movie to its original 16:9 aspect ratio from the intermediate step of the 4:3 capturing device [directly 'hard' encoded to mpeg2].

Any help is welcome, thanks a lot
Wimsch

[manono]

The problem is not to force an original 4:3 movie into a widescreen outlook, but to restore a widescreen movie to its original 16:9 aspect ratio from the intermediate step of the 4:3 capturing device [directly 'hard' encoded to mpeg2].

It's not originally 16:9. It was both broadcast and captured as widescreen 4:3. You can reencode it for 16:9 by cropping a total of 144 rows of pixels (72 from both top and bottom, or some other combination), resizing to 720x576, and encoding for 16:9. This is assuming the intended output format is DVD or some other MPEG-2. It won't look any better afterwards, though. A lot of resolution has already been lost by making it 4:3.

[whschlebaum]

Right you are: it was captured as widescreen in 4:3 format. Instead of cropping the top and bottom lines, as you suggest, i took for Video arange Method the option "No margin [keep aspect]" and as input format 4:3 and as output 16:9.
This puts me in the right direction; I'm still working ont it, but the results seem promising.

Thanks anyway!

[manono]

I don't use TMPGEnc, but if it does it right it either does it the way I described or it just adds a bunch of black bars to the sides so your video looks like a little postage stamp surrounded by a sea of black. Good luck.