Need resizing help

[MycathatesyouAMV]

Ya Ive never been good with the tech stuff of amvs. Aspect Ratio about 50 % of the time causes me problems. I have footage at 704 X 400. For a con I need to convert it to 720 X 480 and encode it to 4:3 playback. I am just stuck on the steps I need to perform in order to get the right settings. I tried just resizing the footage to 720 X 480 but when I set the AR to 4:3 it looks like its not right. Just need some help on what to do.

[Zarxrax]

Your footage is 704x400 which is an aspect ratio of ROUGHLY 16:9 (704/400 = 1.76, 16/9 = 1.78)
So, your footage is 16:9. Thus, its no wonder it looks wrong when you display it as 4:3. So, what you need to do is this:

Resize to 720x352.
Add 64 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom.
Your footage is now 720x480. When you flag it as 4:3, it should appear as 16:9 letterboxed.

[MycathatesyouAMV]

Alright thanks, it worked. Just curious how you figured this out for future reference.

[Mister Hatt]

It's a standard method. There are other ways to do it than what Zarx mentioned but they are more complicated and fancy, albeit much more effective for compression.

[Zarxrax]

Alright thanks, it worked. Just curious how you figured this out for future reference.

Aspect Ratios can seem complicated, but its just basic algebra, really.
This one was a bit difficult due to the fact that its not really the calculations that are difficult, but the fact that there are some extra constraints.

First of all, you needed your footage to be 4:3. Since your footage is 16:9, that means that you have to add letterboxing to make the aspect ratio correct.

For viewing on a computer, we have square pixels, so a 4:3 resolution is 640x480. A common 16:9 resolution is 640x352.
So, in order to make 16:9 display as 4:3, we leave the actual footage at 640x352, but put padding on the top and bottom to fill it out to 640x480. You now have 16:9 footage displayed as 4:3, with a square pixel aspect ratio.

Now, as you may or may not know, dvds do not use square pixels, so instead of having a width of 640, they use a width of 720. So, you just resize your 640x480 footage to 720x480.

However, rather than doing 2 resize operations, we can just collapse them together, and resize to 720x352 to begin with, and add black borders to get the vertical resolution to 480.

[MycathatesyouAMV]

Ran into a little trouble with something. Do you have an im I can get a little bit of help on with this ?