Originally posted by: Karyudo
If you've made a PAL cap at 720 x 576, and you just want to keep the middle 480 lines for NTSC, the aspect ratio will be wrong. Call me stupid, but I don't understand how you can "not use the full width" of 16:9 without scaling the picture. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but the three seconds of thought I've given this suggest I'm not.
If you've made a PAL cap at 720 x 576, and you just want to keep the middle 480 lines for NTSC, the aspect ratio will be wrong. Call me stupid, but I don't understand how you can "not use the full width" of 16:9 without scaling the picture. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but the three seconds of thought I've given this suggest I'm not.
I don't understand it either but xyzzy mentioned PAL SVCD which I think is 480x576 and maybe that's why it was possible to convert it to 720x480 NTSC DVD by just cropping and adding borders.
So I guess if you captured a PAL source at less than 720 horizontally you could do the same thing but then the scaling would be done by the capture device instead.