StaxRip usage (deliberate letterboxing/padding)

[SarasotaSlim]

I've been transcoding movies for about 4 years now, and have finally worked out a style, where
in the second pass, I purposely create a letterbox with approx 40 pixels top and bottom, using VLC.
Then in the third/final pass I use VLC to I place a title and progress/duration info and a logo up top,
and burn in sub-titles in the black area at the bottom.
To achieve that, I use VLC cmd-line, because it supports padding and on-screen text (marquee and logo, etc).

[ I use FreeMake for the first pass, to initially obtain the desired standard resolution. ]

Then, this past week, I came across StaxRip !
[ I''ve played with it for about 8 hours now, and it definitely "feels right". ]

It's UI-design appears to be head-and-shoulders above the competition !
Clearly, it has the most transparent and easiest to use GUI of all the
transcoding tools out there.

-------------

The one improvement I've been seeking is to find a tool that could combine my
first two passes into one.

I was hoping that StaxRip might be up to job, but I can't find any way to force it to
CREATE black bars. (Am I missing something?)

[ I've concluded that its design philosophy must be predicated upon the (erroneous)
notion that no one would WANT black bars. It has a CROPPING filter...but it needs
a PADDING filter, in my view. ]

Any chance a padding-filter could be implemented in StaxRip???

Cheers...

[Selur]

(don't use StaxRip, but) iirc. StaxRip does allow to modify the avisynth script it uses, so you could use AddBorders (http://avisynth.nl/index.php/AddBorders)