Originally posted by: wainsco
MeBeJedi -

I'm starting to get confused here. I've read through the threads, but may have missed something. The source you're extracting from is widescreen, non-animorphic. To make your "4x3" set, have you actually zoomed in and cut the edges of the picture off to make a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, or are you calling it "4x3" rather than "non-animorphic" and still leaving it widescreen (2.35:1)?

I believe what MeBeJedi is referring to is the fact that all WideScreen laserdiscs are letterboxed meaning that they are at the correct ration but to make them fit on the standard 4:3 screen black bars are added to the top and bottom. So, what you have in the case of Star Wars is a 2.35:1 image that has had black bars placed on the top and bottom to fill out the full 1.33:1 (4x3) TV screen. This is very unfortunate but necessary considering that we didn't have 16:9 TVs at the time.

That being said, you can get a much better transfer of a letterboxed video source if you crop out the black bars at the top and bottom. If encoding to 4:3 the encoder will add computer generated "black bars" at the top and bottom. These new black bars will be solid black and much cleaner than the fuzzy grayish and pixelated black bars you will get from letterboxed video. Another great thing about cropping out the black bars is that the encoding time will be dramatically reduced.

So, what TR47 obviously did was a direct conversion rather than cropping out the black bars and replacing them with new generated versions. TR47's motive was to give us a transfer that was as close as possible to the letterboxed laserdiscs. However, he could have done the same thing by cropping out the bars. The quality of the video would not have changed.

I hope MeBeJedi is doing this (the cropping) for his non-anamorphic version. If not, MeBeJedi, please crop those bars

Believe me, I have tested this, you will not sacrifice quality on the video by removing the black bars and letting the encoder add them back in... if 4:3 is what you intend to produce.

To all interested, this process of adding the black bars to the video is sometimes called "fraiming" or "re-fraiming". The idea is to preserve the widescreen presentation on a standard 4:3 screen.

FYI, a letterboxed DVD can be made to be 16:9 Anamorphic without re-encoding the DVD... look that one up on VideoHelp kiddies