Originally posted by: Doctor M
Perusing the Official and Unofficial screenshot sites, and playing around with the images I made a discovery. It's completely inconsistent. Completely, oddly, insanely, and randomly inconsistent. In some cases they take 32-40 lines off the left and a few from the right, sometimes none from the left and a few from the right. I even found a scene where the right side has more image (by like 20 lines) than ANY NTSC edition. (Though where they got the extra image area from is beyond me.)
One reason for this is the fact that different capture cards have different clipping areas. Owning a few different models myself, I found that each card clipped the sides in different places. I was able to hack the settings of one card and remove all clipping, but this isn't something you can do with 99% of them.
I'm not sure on this, but clipping may be different between different LD versions as well -- i.e. the PAL LDs Moth3r used may be different than the US Definitives Dr. Gonzo used.
I realized this a while back when doing my own capturing and trying to figure out the correct aspect ratio. What I decided in the end was that no one is really going to care or notice if it's off a little bit as long as their screen is filled horizontally. What people will notice and possibly get annoyed at is the presence of black bars on the sides -- even moreso if they're not the same size. So I guess if you're going to keep the borders, at least make sure the image is centered.
If you took the Official DVDs as gospel and used them as the reference for the correct aspect ratio, what would the image size of the corresponding Moth3r clip be? What's stopping you from upsizing that to 720xX, since you were planning on resizing it anyway? 
