Robot Chicken - Star Wars

[Simmons]

In the first two episodes there are random black bars in various scenes & normal fullscreen. Is there a program where I can take just the black bars scenes & re size everything to match & not have it constantly switch

[Simmons]

!!!!!!!!!!

[guns1inger]

You lasted 4 minutes before bumping. Such patience.

Short answer - no. If you wanted to automate the process the best you could do is to find the largest set of black bars, and crop everything back to this level, no matter what the cost to everything else. Of course, if this is meant to be part of the overall effect then you are possibly missing the point.

If you want to take the longer approach you can go through and trim the video into clips at each point where the aspect ratio changes, then crop and resize each segment, and then put it all back together again. I suspect, however, that you don't have the patience for this approach.

[PuzZLeR]

AFAIK too, there is no program that does this automatically. I agree with the advice 'Slinger gave, that is, if you do wish to bother with the cropping. But personally, I wouldn't bother.

If I do wish to do this, I would only do it if whole episodes are black banded the exact same way. This may be due to black banding capping a wide screen aspect ratio inside a 4:3 frame. If that is the case, then it may be nice to re-encode them to their native, and true, wide screen aspect ratio.

However, if this varies within the episode, IMO, it's meant to be and meant to be left alone. This is an editing compensation to avoid distortion among several sources and would be too much work to "fix" it properly and may create other distortions anyway.

[guns1inger]

Dr Strangelove does this. Kubrick shot on a mixture of 1.33 and 1.66 footage, so a proper transfer has black bars (albeit small) appearing on and off throughout.

[PuzZLeR]

Dr Strangelove does this. Kubrick shot on a mixture of 1.33 and 1.66 footage, so a proper transfer has black bars (albeit small) appearing on and off throughout.

This is one case where I personally wouldn't touch it with cropping if re-encoding - too much work for gain not worth it. It's meant to be that way IMO to avoid distortion.

@Simmons: A perfect example on my end where I would use cropping, if re-encoding, is some of the music videos from TV (and even on DvDs), which can apply to individual episodes of a series.

Many music videos are captured/encoded in 4:3, however there are black bands top and bottom - the same size throughout the entire music video. This means they were shot in 16:9 (or other wide screen aspect ratio) but delivered in a 4:3 frame, and the black bands are in place to avoid distortion.

Assuming it's NTSC SD and 16:9 shooting, I crop 60 pixels off the top and bottom, resize back to 720x480 and encode with 16:9 aspect ratio. The result is a wide screen format as was natively meant to be, with no black bands and no distortion.