NTSC vs NTSC Widescreen

[rrrrob]

I have been having all sorts of problems with squeezed/distorted video and I think I need to understand some basics to get through this.

I have letterbox video, 720 x 480. I want to crop it and turn it into 16:9/widescreen compatible.

If I create a 16:9 widescreen mpeg and burn it to a DVD, it seems that the image gets squeezed horizontally compared to a straight NTSC 4:3 format. Does this happen with ALL 16:9 content played on a 4:3 TV? I thought it would resize the video correctly, but I can't seem to get it right after countless hours and countless variations of settings on my video editing software (Vegas Video for video, Nero for DVD authoring).

My main goal here is to create a DVD with video that will play on both 4:3 DVD players/TVs and 16:9, widescreen TVs, without distortion...is this impossible or am I just doing something wrong?

[dvpro]

widescreen NTSC?

Hi.
Did you ever receive an answer to your question? I've been having the same problem and did a search on the internet and didn't come up with much. I found this forum and was excited when I saw your post, but then I noticed nobody responded!
I've gotten it to the point where I can "stretch" the picture to 16:9, but the quality looks AWFUL! I'm not sure why. It must have something to do with the pixels. Have you managed to stretch the video without reducing the quality? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
dvpro

[paglamon]

dvpro
Provide full information of your original file using Mediainfo(tree view). And please say what exactly you wish to achieve.

[dvpro]

letterbox to 16:9

Hi.
I'm trying to convert a letterboxed format video (4:3 with black bars on the top and bottom) to anamorphic 16:9 video (to fit perfectly within the frame) without losing any quality. I have a few movies I'd like to convert. Any ideas of how to do this? I will try to get them online in the way you suggested soon. Thanks!

[paglamon]

AFAIK DVD Rebuilder can do this.
Another way would be via Virtualdub(with MPEG2 plugin) and TMPGEnc. Feed the original into Virtualdub. Crop out the black borders. Resize to 720 x 480. Frameserve to TMPGEnc Plus to encode.

[dvpro]

Interesting. I did not know virtualdub had this capability. I love Virtualdub. What menu is this under? Thanks!

[paglamon]

Which capability are you enquiring about ?

[dvpro]

black borders

I figured out how to resize. How do I crop out the black borders?

[paglamon]

Video/Filters/Add../Null transform

[dvpro]

null transform

Hi.
Thanks for all the help. Unfortunately, I don't think I know what I'm doing. "Null transform" doesn't seem to effect the video at all. Any ideas? Or any alternate methods that I could manually crop out the black bars? I know how I could do it in photoshop- but pretty sure I can't do much with video there...

[paglamon]

When in Null transform click on "Cropping" and you will get the cropping window.

[dvpro]

Yes!

Genius GENIUS GENIUS!!! Yes! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thank you so much for your help!
One last question- is there ANY way to output a file to MPEG2 with virtual dub? I can convert it of course, but this would save me a step. Thanks!

[paglamon]

is there ANY way to output a file to MPEG2 with virtual dub?

No.You can, however, frameserve from Virtualdub to some other MPEG2 encoder,like TMPGEnc Plus.
Also try out AVIDemux. It can do all that Virtualdub can and also produce MPEG2 files.

[dvpro]

frameserving

I'm not sure what it means to "frameserve" but I will definitely check out the programs you mentioned. Thanks!

[paglamon]

http://neuron2.net/LVG/frameserving.html