Converting widescreen VHS to 16:9 anamorphic?

[MJPollard]

Any thoughts, if it can be done at all (and if it's worthwhile to do so)? I have a few widescreen VHS movies (the "Star Wars SE" trilogy) that I'd like to capture and author to DVD, and if I can make them into "genuine" widescreen, so much the better. I'd appreciate some tips from the gurus out there... either that, or tell me not to bother because it isn't worth the hassle.

(Note: I am NOT interested in hearing about the merits of the "Star Wars" SE trilogy versus the originals. Please save your piss and vinegar for the +/- and DVD2One/InstantCopy wars. )

[wwaag]

Don't know what you mean by "genuine" widescreen, but here's my experience.

I have the original widescreen Star Wars trilogy on laserdisc. I used an ADVC-100 to convert the video to DV. I ended up encoding the video as if it were a 4:3 (which it really is). If you crop the top and bottom black bands, then you lose the captions. Although they could have been re-inserted using Adobe Premiere, that would have been a pain. I compared clips wherein I cropped the black bars and encoded just the video vs encoding the entire screen which included the black bars, and honestly, I couldn't tell the difference. Using Tempgen (12+ hrs), I finally produced a DVD that is difficult to tell the difference from the original laserdisc when they are switched back and forth.

Bottom line, I wouldn't worry about it, although I'm sure that some purists would disagree. Just my opinion.

[flaninacupboard]

the big difference is if you have a 16:9 TV set, in which case you get a nicer looking picture if you encode in 16:9.
star wars is (finally!) next on my list for capping and encoding, and i'll be cropping the black bars, encoding in 16:9 and adding the subs back in using a virtual dub filter and a handwritten sub rip text file. nice

[Gillies]

dont most widescreen tvs have a zoom feature anyway?

[monoxide77]

encoding in 16:9 and adding the subs back in using a virtual dub filter and a handwritten sub rip text file

could you please elaborate on this method?

[MJPollard]

encoding in 16:9 and adding the subs back in using a virtual dub filter and a handwritten sub rip text file

could you please elaborate on this method?

What he said. Also the part about cutting out the upper and lower black bands and re-encoding in TMPGEnc... specifically, settings needed to encode the chopped video, etc., etc. (I've browsed through some of the guides, and though several of them say what the 16:9-related options are, they're not as forthcoming on how you should use them.)

[shardison]

Don't make it a "genuine" widescreen" anamophic. You'd have to trim the black bars, and stretch the picture to the full 480 height to encode. Then your TV/DVD would squish the picture back down to the proper 16:9.

The "stretching" step is adding information that's not really there, and it further degrades the video by increasing the number of bits to encode. There is nothing to be gained and everything to loose, quality-wise. Leave anamorphic authoring for stuff shot with an anamorphic lens.

[dphirschler]

You can do it by cropping the black bars. But make sure you get the aspect ratio correct. Also, make sure you inverse telecine it first because you will be vertically stretching the picture and an interlaced image stretched will look very bad. Also, use the "precise bi-linear" resize for best results. Bi-cubic seems a little blocky to me.

That being said, a "true" widescreen version will not look better than a "zoomed" letterboxed version as all you are doing is stretching (vertically) the pixels. However, you might gain some bits for encoding the picture by cropping off the black, but that may be miniscule since they are only black bars. And you are basically giving back your gains by encoding a stretched image. But it is worth a try.

An anamorphic widescreen encode is 16x9. The movie might be at a different aspect, so make cure you leave a certain amount of black bars to keep the movie aspect ratio correct.

When an anamorphic widescreen movie is played back on a 16x9 TV, it is stretched horizontally to fit the screen and depending on the aspect ratio, it will still have black bars (albeit smaller). If played back on a 4:3 television on a DVD player set properly, it will squeeze it vertically by adding black bars to the top and bottom. If it is played back on a 4:3 TV on a DVD player set improperly, it will appear stretched vertically.

A letterboxed widescreen move played back on a 16x9 TV will appear with black bars on both the top/bottom as well as on the sides unless it is stretched. It will have to be stretched both vertically and horizontally to fill the screen. That is basically what you are doing with your encode. A letterboxed movie played back on a 4:3 TV will have black bars above and below.

What might work out better for you is cropping the black bars and then adding them back in again. What this accomplishes is removing the small amount of noise that will be present in the black bars from your video tape and replacing it with perfect smooth black bars. That will encode much more efficiently and therefore improve your picture.

Good luck.


Darryl

[sdlehman]

How would I deal with macrovision when capturing from vhs?

[flaninacupboard]

sorry i can't give much info on the subs right now, i'm at work
but basically you write a text file that has a start and end cue and a piece of text (i'll post an example later) and put in as many cues you need. you feed this as a sub rip text file into sub station alpha. you now hav an ssa file which can be read by a virtual dub filter (don't remember the name, i'll post it later) which can set size font colour etc.
it's a fairly involved process and the subs are not selecable (i.e. they are burned into the image) but for this paticular application that's a good thing, i don't -want- to turn the alien translations off, and to my eyes burned subs look better than overlaid subs, and will look the same on every DVD player.

as for the anamorphic issue, i always make my outputs anamorphic, because i cannot stand the way non-anamorphic stretched material looks on a widescreen TV. i don't know if the problem is as bad on NTSC systems, but on PAL TV's the drop in resolution is really obvious, and very ugly.

[flaninacupboard]

ok, as promised;

this is what a sub rip text file looks like, you can write it yourself in notepad, just like this!

1
00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:05,000
This is a subtitle.

2
00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:12,226
Here's Another!!

3
00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:17,000
But why did you have to fry poor greedo?

4
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:22,000
He'll put a price on your head so high you won't be able to come near a civilised system.

and so on. the numbers are hh:mms,milleseconds.

run this through sub station alpha http://www.eswat.demon.co.uk/substation.html
and you get a ssa file, which looks like this,

!SRT a SSA Conversor, por Feñiz 2.001
Synch Point: Side 1 0m00s
Collisions: Normal
Timer: 100.0000
Style: Default,Arial,26,16749973,0,16777215,16777215,-1,0,0,0,2,17,17,61,0,0
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:02.00,0:00:05.00,Default,NTP,0000,00 00,0000,!Effect,This is a subtitle.
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:07.00,0:00:12.22,Default,NTP,0000,00 00,0000,!Effect,Here's Another!!
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:14.00,0:00:17.00,Default,NTP,0000,00 00,0000,!Effect,But why did you have to fry poor greedo?
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:18.00,0:00:22.00,Default,NTP,0000,00 00,0000,!Effect,He'll put a price on your head so high you won't be able to come near a civilised system.

run this through the virtual dub filter, here
http://customlogick.4t.com/reviews/pics/digiguide/Subtitler.zip

and you end up with hard subs whenever you like.

[monoxide77]

damn that's cool.

[MilesAhead]

Assuming you could output DVD letterboxed just the same as the source, there are some automatic ways to autocrip,resize or "postage stamp" the video. I bought a lot of Hong Kong DVDs that were Letterboxed before stuff was being released as true widescreen anamorphic. I could put the DVD through AutoGK to get an avi file that was "postage stamped." The video played in the original size as the source.

Another automatic way was DVD Rebuilder Pro
If the input was letterboxed you could output anamorphic widescreen DVD. For this to produce the correct aspect ration, the input needed to have a viewable area very close to 1.85:1. If not, there's an option to resize the picture. If the option is used it can prevent the aspect ration from being messed up, but it may do it by sizing the image to exactly fill the 16x9 frame. The aspect looks good in this case, but a side effect can be kind of a "soft" result as the video information is spread out to fill the frame.. so to speak. Anyway, you'd have to try DVD-RB to see what I mean. 1.28 is never going to be updated. But you can update it yourself to some extent by doing things like replacing HCEnc with a newer version etc..

For sharp crisp image, although postage stamped, I think AutoGK does a good job automatically using auto-crop. But then you have an .avi. Up to you if you want to hit this again to convert to DVD format.