Thanks for your explanation, DE. I'm still a little in the dark though. :-) (Sorry to talk about this in your thread.)

HD doesn't have NAB, so an HD picture should be scaled down to 704x576 and padded (although 704x576 is also valid for DVD video, so you could skip padding it to 720).

This starts to explain certain pecularities with DVD transfers. They often have a black area at one side or both sides when ripped, though some of them don't nowadays.

These black bars are designed for old non-HDTVs that overscan, are they? If you view many DVDs on your widescreen television on exact scan (or just scan, whatever the manufacturer calls 1:1) you can see the black bars. Would your TV be functioning as a square pixel display in this case, or is it just monitors? because I don't see why one would need to crop a transfer to suit a monitor.

I recently worked with a PAL anamorphic widescreen DVD transfer that did *not* have those black pixels at either side when ripped. I added in some HDTV footage to match it. To do so, I had to crop 7 pixels from either side of the HDTV footage and resize to 720x576. I didn't know about any of this at the time. I was just taking snapshots of my sources into photoshop, measuring the pixels of visible image, calculating the aspect ratio accordingly and resizing. I take it I did right? I would hate to have to re-do my work. Both DVD and HDTV were 1024x440 with borders cropped at the end, or about 2.32:1, and visually they fitted perfectly.

I am sorry to be a massive pain in the neck, but this is a new thing to me. Can you explain exactly what you did with the Death Star footage? (MOth3r, I'll move this to PM, if it's annoying.)