Aspect Ratio Problems with "High Fidelity"

[poiuy]

Hi all -
I'm having a problem encoding "High Fidelity". It's an odd kind of animorphic, so I had to resize to 448x352 (600x464 looks great too). Without cropping the aspect ratio looks good - BUT, the second that I crop with either mpeg2avi or with Flask it warps the image into a squished version of the movie. Anyone know what's going on and how to fix it?
The top image is not cropped at all and the bottom image, encoded with the same resize is squished. If I cropped it even closer the image would be more squished. Is it cropping and then resizing? I'm using DivX 5.02 Pro and Mpeg2Avi v0.1.6.
Thx in advance

[benderman]

Use Gordian Knot. If you don't want to use it to encode the video you can still use the bitrate- and resolution-calculator. Maybe one problam could be that you used the crop/resize of the encoding-programm and the one from the codec.

[poiuy]

Thank you!!!

Thank you so much! I was going crazy with all the fiddling with the aspect ratio and cropping. All the time the end result was a 560x240 file - no matter what I did. Apparently I had set some resize settings in the codec itself - which is what was causing the problem - it was forcing the video to 560x240 after I was done finding all the settings.

Thanks again!!!