Auto Crop

[Skenko]

I've been using DVDFab for a while now to rip my blu ray / dvd collection to MKV. On nearly everything I've ripped so far I always have auto cropped selected to get rid of black borders.

Occasionally the auto crop feature will pick an odd resolution and not quite remove all of the borders. In these cases I think that maybe the software has misread the source, so I disable cropping as a fail safe to make sure I get the full picture.

However, while watching some dvd extras I ripped the aspect ratio changes for showing deleted scenes e.t.c. I didn't notice anything missing so this must be a file I created with autocrop disabled. Though it did make me think that this occasionally happens in films. In which case, if I've selected autocrop and it chops the borders perfectly in the preview screen, what happens if later on in the movie the ratio changes to have a larger height? Will I lose those extra images?

Or is DVDFab clever enough to read the whole source data and choose whichever largest ratio applies and ensure you always get the full picture? ....which I guess may go to explain on some files where it picks a strange ratio which includes black borders?

[signals]

I think it depends on how the disc is authored. Deleted scenes are sometimes not anamorphically transferred, so on those you will get black bars on all sides. For a movie that changes aspect ratio during the film (unusual but not impossible I guess) the most likely effect would be that the picture would look squashed or stretched. Usually in a widescreen movie if there is some square content (like a film clip from an old TV show or movie) it is normally either letterboxed or pillarboxed so that it matches the rest of the movie.

[Skenko]

thanks for replying so quickly. appreciate it.

so I guess the only fail safe way would be to disable the cropping and take the full original source aspect ratio?

But then I guess to put up with the larger file sizes and extra ripping time it's prob not worth it for such a small percentage of content that may be affected, and I'll probably be able to notice while watching whether its missed out a significant aspect change and can re-rip.

[signals]

I do just the opposite. I leave auto cropping on and spot check using the slider below the still image preview on the Edit page. The only problems I have are with the Warner Archive collection burned-to-order discs. The menus are one aspect ratio, the movie sometimes another and DVDFab gets confused.

[GregiBoy]

There is another problem that you have to watch here sometimes though. Sometime the subtitles appear in the cropped area.

Like Signals, I also do a spot check to see if this occurs.