Sides cut off on converted video

[PC812]

Hi, new to these forums. I've been ripping/converting DVDs and Blurays for several years now, so I'm not new to the process, but I'm also pretty ignorant on technical details, so apologies if this is a stupid question.

I'm a Mac user and I have an Apple TV, so my usual process is to rip a DVD with Mac DVDRipper Pro, then convert the video with Handbrake using the Apple TV 3 preset and add it into iTunes so I can watch it on my aTV. This process has been pretty much wrinkle-free with hundreds of DVDs I own, but I recently ran into a wrinkle with The Great Escape. For some reason, the video does not size to the width of the screen, neither on my Apple TV, in iTunes on my computer, or when I open it with VLC. I checked the original DVD rip file and this too doesn't size the width of the movie to the screen. So it seems to be an issue with the source but I've never dealt with this before and I'm not sure how to fix it.

Is there a way to fix this so that the video fits the width of the screen instead of appearing as a box in the center of my TV?

[jagabo]

Handbrake probably didn't crop properly. Maybe 16:9 content at the start of the video confused it. Try manually cropping based on the 2.35:1 movie, not studio/distributor logos, etc. that appear at the start of the movie.