DVD - X-VID Crop Procedure

[Kewrock]

Hey Folks. Old Fab customer, new forum member. Pleased to meet you

Ok, I'm converting Inglorious Basterds to X-vid. The movie is letterboxed, and I want to crop the sides so that the image fills my tv screen without black bars top and bottom.

So I go into the crop tab on the video effects panel and hit the "custom" button. I have determined the values I think I want are 126 for the sides and 70 for the top and bottom. Now my question is, do I want to check the "keep aspect ratio" button? and what about that Pan&Scan slider?

I dont want to lose any quality with any unneccessary resizing

With those values the original and cropped aspect ratios are both 1.77:1
The screen res goes from 852x480 to 576x320. Now I read in the preferred settings post that I want to keep one of these numbers at 704, but that's not even a choice.

Thank's in advance.

[signals]

If you don't check the Keep box the video will look squashed or stretched (stretched in your case I think). You can do this more easily by selecting manual crop and an output aspect ratio that matches your TV, then using the "process black bars" (formerly resize) slider to zoom the image to fill all the black bars within the yellow lines.

Hey Folks. Old Fab customer, new forum member. Pleased to meet you

Ok, I'm converting Inglorious Basterds to X-vid. The movie is letterboxed, and I want to crop the sides so that the image fills my tv screen without black bars top and bottom.

So I go into the crop tab on the video effects panel and hit the "custom" button. I have determined the values I think I want are 126 for the sides and 70 for the top and bottom. Now my question is, do I want to check the "keep aspect ratio" button? and what about that Pan&Scan slider?

I dont want to lose any quality with any unneccessary resizing

With those values the original and cropped aspect ratios are both 1.77:1
The screen res goes from 852x480 to 576x320. Now I read in the preferred settings post that I want to keep one of these numbers at 704, but that's not even a choice.

Thank's in advance.

[signals]

Here is a step-by-step guide for this confusing subject:

1. Determine if your content is 1.8:1 or 2.35 :1. 1.8 will fill the screen on most TVs and you don't need to do anything.
2. If it is 2.35:1 (or anything greater than 1.8), click on the Video Effects button on the Edit page.
3. On the Resize tab, click on Supported by Device (if it is available) or Customized size. Set the Customized size to a size you want that matches the aspect ratio of the TV, e.g. 720x400, 1.8:1 which will fill your TV. Click on the Crop tab.
4. Click the Customized radio button.
5. Put a check in the Keep Aspect Ratio box.
6. Use the slider to make the black bars disappear in the Output preview window(the lower one). You are finished. Click OK.

See the attached screen capture which shows a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen movie (Two Mules for Sister Sara) cropped to fill the screen on almost any North American TV. Nothing is taken from the top or bottom of the active video, only from the sides.

[Kewrock]

Ok, 720x400/keep A.R./full pan&scan seems to do what I want. But In the best practices sticky post by Gregiboy it says for NTSC I should use 704x??? instead of 720. Does it matter? If so, what is the other half of the ratio, 480 or 486? I tried them both 480 and 486 didn't look any different, but the output zoom went from 40% using 720x400 to 30% using 704x480&6. The cropping appeared the same, but the sample picture got smaller.

Thanks for the info. This is the reason I've given up on converting in the past. I could never wrap my head around these ratios, or more-so what they mean, and how they effect the final product.

[signals]

The size is not as important as the aspect ratio that the size provides. You can even choose a smaller size as long as the aspect ratio matches the TV. 720x400 is what DVDFab suggests for the movie I was using and the output aspect ratio I was forcing it to make. I have learned to love the black bars because I want the full picture with 2.35:1 movies, so I just set crop to automatic and choose the size I want for my Archos. For the TV, I always play the original DVD since my player will upscale that but not a MPEG-4 file. It can be confusing because there are different ways the DVDs can be authored. Experiment with the settings by making short conversions using the Chapter selction function.

You should not ever need to use 720x480 as an output size, which is an apect ratio of 1.5:1. For a 1.8:1 TV, get as close as you can to that ratio while keeping the two dimensions divisible by 16. 720/400=1.8, 704/384=1.83, so I would use 720x400. Remember that Greg is in Australia, which uses PAL, plus everything down there is upside down. I haven't read that sticky in a while so I'm not sure what he was referring to.

[GregiBoy]

[Kewrock]

Ok, one thing i'm stuck on. For NTSC do I use 704x384 or 720x400 I did one of each and didn't really notice a difference, they both looked ok. You guys seen to have a difference of opinion (Signals and Gregiboy) on this. I've attached Gregs post.

[GregiBoy]

These figures are meant as a general guide only as most NTSC titles we get down under are 704 x XXX.

The best bet is to maintain the width that the actual DVD is composed at and this shows up in the video settings window but is not always accurate.

Quite often, I will use MediaInfo to inspect the actual VOB's to see the actual composition resolution.

[GregiBoy]

Or play it with VLC and then use the Tools-Media Information