Originally posted by: Jashun44
Originally posted by: Laserman

Hey Laserman, do you plan on converting these to anamorphic? That's my question about the current anamorphic ones. Does anybody know how these were done? I know to convert them you can just delete the "black bars", but these look better than to have just done that.

It's a little more complicated than just cutting off the black bars. Your encoder has to support 16:9 conversion. What I do with mine is tell my encoder (TMPNGEnc Plus) my original source is 4:3 525 Line (NTSC 704x480) and that it is interlaced. Next, I set the Video Arrange Method to Full Screen (Keep Aspect Ratio). The video arrange method tells how the video should be displayed. The setting I use tells it to Maximize the window and keep the aspect ratio. Next I use a filter called Clip Frame to crop the black bars. The image size is 720x approximately 276 (this varies depending on how thick the bars are). Finally, I go to another tab where you specify output. I tell my encoder to convert the video to 16:9 and tell it to output the size to 720 x 480. All of that together stretches the image and adds new black bars which look better than the LD's original black bars. The picture still looks correct because of the Video Arrange Method setting telling it to keep the aspect ratio. In addition, the color of the new bars is also set by the user. I don't know why anyone would want to, but you could have purple bars if you choose to.

The torrent file choose a method similar to this because the subtitles for Greedo are on the video image instead of in the bottom black bar like they are on the LD. My subtitles are also overlayed on the video image. I say similar because I don't know what encoder was used to convert from AVI or DV to MPEG-2. I guess you could have the subtitles in the bottom black bar if you have a script that says to generate subtitles after the resizing is done.

Finally, once encoded, there is a flag somewhere in the video that tells your DVD Player how to display the image. This flag is overridden by your DVD Player's setting. So, if your DVD Player is set to 4:3, it will convert the image to 4:3 by removing some of the vertical lines and the image will look correct on a 4:3 TV. This is undetectable by our eyes if done properly. Likewise, if your DVD Player is set to 16:9, it will take the read the flag from the video and correctly display it at 16:9 if you are playing it on a 16:9 TV.

I hope this information helps explain it a little. I didn't go into IVTC which is a process of making the video appear progressive instead of interlace by converting the framerate to that of film instead of video, but that is something for another time.

Patrick