Resizing Widescreen DVDs?

Icarus · Post by **Icarus** » Tue Jan 28, 2003 4:58 pm

Hello everyone. I'm trying to make an AMV using the Cowboy Bebop series. The trouble is, I really want to use some scenes from the Cowboy Bebop Movie (knocking on heaven's door) but the movie is in widescreen format whereas the 30-odd TV episode aren't. I've tried resizing the movie using Virtualdub but the product is just plain ugly - people look distorted and the quality is much lower, it seems.

Does anyone have any ideas how to solve this problem?

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Tue Jan 28, 2003 5:31 pm

you want to crop it to be 4:3 I'm assuming, in which case (assuming the DVD is letterboxed) youd have to place 3 filters: neutral bicubic resize to 640x480, null transform to 480x360, and again resize neutral bicubic to whatever you're editing in (320x240 or 352x240 or whatever). If you're trying to letterbox and not crop the video then this process wont help.

Icarus · Post by **Icarus** » Tue Jan 28, 2003 5:45 pm

Thanks for the prompt response. What do you mean by "letterbox"? And where can I get a program that has all those filters? Virtualdub doesn't seem to have them.

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Tue Jan 28, 2003 5:58 pm

uhh vdub has resize and null transform built in. Letterbox means the video is 16:9 (widescreen) contained inside a 4:3 (fullscreen) frame. When a movie has black bars on the top and bottom its letterboxed :\
You might be more familiar with the home video terms, in which case, the method I mentioned would make the video 'pan and scan' so to speak, instead of letterbox

Dugan · Post by **Dugan** » Wed Jan 29, 2003 10:18 am

The best way to resize anamorphic footage is with a program called "FitCd" (http://shh.dvdboard.de/). You fire it up, load your D2V file into it, tell it what resolution the movie would be in if you cropped the black borders, and then save the AVS file it generates.

Presto. Perfect aspect ratio and no black borders on the sides.

Ashyukun · Post by **Ashyukun** » Wed Jan 29, 2003 10:49 am

Hmmm. That program looks interesting. It looks like it's basically a GUI for generating AVS files though, right?