Anamorphic?

    What exactly is an anamorphic rip? I've been told it's preferred for x264 rips, but I'm not sure how to make one, and is there any increase in quality?

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      11 years ago

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      11 years ago
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    • ZEN

    HI:If the movie is anamorphic on the disk that's what you get with the Fab rip.:)
    Some dvd disks i have that are older have the anamorphic version of the movie on one side and the 4x3 regular version on the other so ripping the anamorphic side would be a anamorphic rip of the disk.

    6 days later

    For some reason DVDFab doesn't rip the output to the full anamorphic resolution. How do I get it to do that?

    DVDFab encodes the displayed aspect ratio, there is no need to stretch or squash the images since there are no physical constraints (other than the monitor's screen) on the image. That being said, you can trick DVDFab into producing an anamorphic-looking image but it will not play back correctly on any player that I know, you would need one like DVDFab Media Player that allows you to control the pixel aspect ratio during playback. Anamorphic images in movies first came into being as a workaround for fitting a widescreen image onto an almost square 35mm film frame while using the largest exposable area of the film for the image rather than leaving it blank.

    Hats off to SeeMoreDigital for the excellent tutorial on his website which is linked in post #3, I commend it to everyone.

    [QUOTE=signals;167255]
    Hats off to SeeMoreDigital for the excellent tutorial on his website which is linked in post #3, I commend it to everyone.[/QUOTE]

    +1, reading this site enabled me to figure out what had gone wrong with a DVD rip that I did a few years where the aspect ratio was completely screwed, a little work with VidCoder and I was able to restore it to it's correct 16x9 aspect ratio ;-)

    Thanks! For some reason I was under the impression that encoding the full anamorphic resolution resulted in higher quality rips.

    It is very true that anamorphic transfers on DVDs and Blurays produce higher quality images than flat transfers. Transfers like this use the available bits for moving image data instead of black bars. To see the effect of flat transfers of widescreen content, find a copy of the original DVD R1 release of Goodfellas.

    Quite a few years ago (when the sizes of HDD's was low and their costs were high), I and some others over on the Doom9 forum experimented with converting (MPEG-2) DVD's with their non-square (anamorphic) pixels to square pixel (MPEG-4) encodes. This involved working out the original pixel height of the movies image area, cropping away any black mattes followed be re-sizing the pixel width of the movies image area... Overall the experiment worked well and the resulting encodes looked good.

    Nowadays however, because HDD's are so large and pretty cheap, there's less of a need to do any encoding at all. Indeed, most of us just extract the MPEG-2 'movie only' part the original DVD and don't perform any encoding at all...

    For some reason I was told with x264, anamorphic DVDs should always be ripped at the full anamorphic resolution.

    Where were you told this? I am wondering if there was possibly a misunderstanding of your question or your interpretation of the answer. DVDFab allows you to encode the full decoded resolution (or other desired size), so that round things stay round and the movie looks just like it did in a theater.

    It was on an encoding forum. Is the default resolution in the ripper the full decoded resolution?

    Like, for example, the resolution listed in the crop menu, once I've cropped it, is 853x458, but when it encodes it comes out to something smaller than that. I was told x264 rips should always be encoded at that larger resolution.

    [QUOTE=ZacharyGeorgeNN;167307] I was told x264 rips should always be encoded at that larger resolution.[/QUOTE]Whoever is telling you this is wrong!

    Sufficed to say all 'Widescreen Anamorphic' NTSC (MPEG-2) DVD's are encoded using 720x480 pixels with 16:9 DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) signalling. So there's nothing stopping you generating a 720x480 MPEG-4 AVC encode with 16:9 DAR signalling too!

    If there any black mattes above and below the image, you can either crop them away or keep them. It makes very little difference to the finished file size either-way because the colour black consumes very little to no bits...

    In their rips, the resolution in Media Info is always listed as something like 670x546 ~> 728x546. Supposedly this is supposed to be higher quality, but I don't notice any difference.

    Hmmm...

    We would have to know more about your DVD sources to comment further. As some of them might not be 'widescreen anamorphic'...

    Unfortunately many early NTSC discs were 4:3 not 16:9. Which introduces a whole new level of confusion :eek:

    So in the first picture here, the resolution listed after I've cropped away the black bars is 1000x576:



    But once I press okay, it says the output resolution is 704x404. What I've been told is that for a higher quality rip, I should encode that full 1000x576 resolution, but DVDFab can't do that. Is that larger resolution even better quality?

    3 months later

    Like in Handbrake, for example, you can encode a 720x480 anamorphic DVD to have the rip come out to, say, 720x576, which gets the full resolution stored on the DVD.