I'm looking for some advice on how to correctly convert some poorly mastered DVDs into MP4s. The DVDs I'm working with were mastered before flat panel screens were common, so they didn't take much care in making sure the video was edge-to-edge. I'd like to 1) crop the image to eliminate the dead space, 2) scale the image to a specific size, and 3) retain the chapter marks.
Unfortunately, these three things don't seem to go together very well in DVDfab. The first problem is that the auto-cropping in DVDFab is very lenient, where I would prefer a stricter crop. By this, I mean that the auto-cropping tries to preserve as much image as possible, where I would like to eliminate as much dead-space as possible... and I'm willing to lose a little bit of image to accomplish it. Unfortunately, because the mastering is so poor on these videos, the dead space on the left margin changes shape throughout the video, ranging anywhere from about 7 pixels at the smallest to about 20 at the widest.
Due to the "lenient" nature of DVDfab cropping, the autocrop won't crop more than the 7 pixels from the left side, because it wants to keep all the data in the few frames with a narrow border at the expense of keeping a huge dead space through most of the video. I'd gladly crop the entire 20 pixels off, knowing that I'd lose a minor amount of image, but end up with a much better end result. However, manually cropping the image doesn't seem to work correctly with scaling.
If I try to scale to any standard value (640x480, etc) the program completely ignores all my cropping and shrinks the entire frame (dead space and all) into the 640x480 image. If I let it auto-crop, it wants to move it to a 632x480 image (or worse yet, sometimes 631x480 which makes the compression routine crash with an error!).
So, basically I can get it cropped if I'm willing to NOT have aggressive cropping and NOT have a default size, but if I want either one of those, I'm just out of luck.
Finally, I'd be willing to do it in two steps, except that ripping it to a .mp4 file and then trying to scale it requires using the file converter instead of the dvd ripper, and I lose the chapter marks. If there was a way to crop the image and retain it in DVD format (preserving the chapter marks) and then run it through a second process converting it from DVD to MP4, that would be fine.
I cannot believe that I'm the only person that wants to crop and scale a video at the same time, nor can I believe that I'm the only person that wants to keep chapter marks. Quite frankly, I'm just not that special.
I asked about cropping and scaling previously, but after an entire month, I have yet to get a single person able to tell me if it's even POSSIBLE, much less how I can accomplish it. If there's anyone out there that knows how to crop an image and scale it to a specific size at the same time... or how to do it in two steps without losing the chapter marks, I'd love to hear from you; or point me to a tutorial. I've already done searches of this site, but perhaps someone knows another where I can get advice on how to make DVDfab do what I'm trying to do.
My ultimate goal would be:
1) Start with the following image.
2) Crop it at the red rectangle, which has a 4:3 aspect ratio. I lose a small amount on the top and bottom to maintain the AR, but I'm okay with that.
3) Scale the resulting cropped area to 512x384 (a reasonably common size, since both height and width are divisible by 16, but not one of DVDfab's default sizes)
4) Keep the chapters.
Can this be done with DVDfab? Can it be done if I use DVDfab along with another program?
Unfortunately, these three things don't seem to go together very well in DVDfab. The first problem is that the auto-cropping in DVDFab is very lenient, where I would prefer a stricter crop. By this, I mean that the auto-cropping tries to preserve as much image as possible, where I would like to eliminate as much dead-space as possible... and I'm willing to lose a little bit of image to accomplish it. Unfortunately, because the mastering is so poor on these videos, the dead space on the left margin changes shape throughout the video, ranging anywhere from about 7 pixels at the smallest to about 20 at the widest.
Due to the "lenient" nature of DVDfab cropping, the autocrop won't crop more than the 7 pixels from the left side, because it wants to keep all the data in the few frames with a narrow border at the expense of keeping a huge dead space through most of the video. I'd gladly crop the entire 20 pixels off, knowing that I'd lose a minor amount of image, but end up with a much better end result. However, manually cropping the image doesn't seem to work correctly with scaling.
If I try to scale to any standard value (640x480, etc) the program completely ignores all my cropping and shrinks the entire frame (dead space and all) into the 640x480 image. If I let it auto-crop, it wants to move it to a 632x480 image (or worse yet, sometimes 631x480 which makes the compression routine crash with an error!).
So, basically I can get it cropped if I'm willing to NOT have aggressive cropping and NOT have a default size, but if I want either one of those, I'm just out of luck.
Finally, I'd be willing to do it in two steps, except that ripping it to a .mp4 file and then trying to scale it requires using the file converter instead of the dvd ripper, and I lose the chapter marks. If there was a way to crop the image and retain it in DVD format (preserving the chapter marks) and then run it through a second process converting it from DVD to MP4, that would be fine.
I cannot believe that I'm the only person that wants to crop and scale a video at the same time, nor can I believe that I'm the only person that wants to keep chapter marks. Quite frankly, I'm just not that special.
I asked about cropping and scaling previously, but after an entire month, I have yet to get a single person able to tell me if it's even POSSIBLE, much less how I can accomplish it. If there's anyone out there that knows how to crop an image and scale it to a specific size at the same time... or how to do it in two steps without losing the chapter marks, I'd love to hear from you; or point me to a tutorial. I've already done searches of this site, but perhaps someone knows another where I can get advice on how to make DVDfab do what I'm trying to do.
My ultimate goal would be:
1) Start with the following image.
2) Crop it at the red rectangle, which has a 4:3 aspect ratio. I lose a small amount on the top and bottom to maintain the AR, but I'm okay with that.
3) Scale the resulting cropped area to 512x384 (a reasonably common size, since both height and width are divisible by 16, but not one of DVDfab's default sizes)
4) Keep the chapters.
Can this be done with DVDfab? Can it be done if I use DVDfab along with another program?
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