Footage ripping to the wrong aspect ration

[Songbird21]

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is a widescreen series, yet when I rip it the file comes out as 720 X 480. Wth? Do any of you guys know what happened and how I could fix this? I'm using DVDfab.

[LantisEscudo]

Most widescreen series on DVD are anamorphic. This page in the guides can help you with dealing with them.

[Mister Hatt]

Either use the bluray (the show is sorta halfway between 720p and 1080p depending on scene, but has some fucking weird dither which needs an AQ of like 1.5 as well as lowered qpmin and slightly weird rdo settings) or just encode it anamorphically anyway. I don't know why but AMVers seem to have some sort of allergy to anamorphic encoding, which makes no sense seeing as it'd be easier for convention coordinators to play back when they demand ridiculous MPEG-2 encodes on top of it.

[mirkosp]

the show is sorta halfway between 720p and 1080p depending on scene

It's a 540p show just like you'd expect from BONES.

[Phantasmagoriat]

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is a widescreen series, yet when I rip it the file comes out as 720 X 480. Wth? Do any of you guys know what happened and how I could fix this? I'm using DVDfab.

That's the way it should be. North American DVD's are always 720x480.

Mathematically that is 3:2 (1.5), but on the package it says 4:3 or 16:9...

It sounds like a contradiction, but it's not: DVD Players stretch footage during playback.
This is how 720x480 can be used for both 4:3 and 16:9
*You are now in the same boat as your DVD player*
/bad joke. You need to resize. Try spline36resize(width, height)

I don't know why but AMVers seem to have some sort of allergy to anamorphic encoding, which makes no sense seeing as it'd be easier for convention coordinators to play back when they demand ridiculous MPEG-2 encodes on top of it.

Using square pixels in the correct aspect ratio prevents any text/effects added during the editing process from being deformed later on when the footage is re-stretched. Plus I don't think the average AMVer knows enough about Aspect Ratio to work with it comfortably. IMO the part in the guide that says resizing footage is optional should actually be mandatory.

[Mister Hatt]

Adding text and effects that are anamorphic safe is easy... Maybe the editor who messes this up is, I daresay, incompetent?

[Cannonaire]

Mathematically that is 3:2 (1.5), but on the package it says 4:3 or 16:9...

If the footage is supposed to be 4:3, it will probably say so on the DVD package, but if it's any kind of widescreen, it could say any number of things, like 1.85:1 and 1.78:1. You can safely ignore these numbers though; DVDs AFAIK will only ever have two aspect ratios, and those are 4:3 and 16:9 (anamorphic). When you index your footage (probably with DGIndex or DVD2AVI), it will tell you which aspect ratio you have.

Using square pixels in the correct aspect ratio prevents any text/effects added during the editing process from being deformed later on when the footage is re-stretched. Plus I don't think the average AMVer knows enough about Aspect Ratio to work with it comfortably. IMO the part in the guide that says resizing footage is optional should actually be mandatory.

I agree that the first part of what you said is true, and I think that in some cases - such as mixing sources with different aspect ratios - resizing beforehand can be the best option. I completely disagree that the guide should say resizing is mandatory. When it makes sense, anamorphic is certainly the best way to go, and it's not difficult at all to do correctly. It will let you maintain the exact level of detail your source had as well as in some cases giving you a smaller file than you would have if you resized first. All you really have to do is set PAR in your project settings so effects will be right and then set PAR to the same thing when you mux.

I don't know why but AMVers seem to have some sort of allergy to anamorphic encoding, which makes no sense seeing as it'd be easier for convention coordinators to play back when they demand ridiculous MPEG-2 encodes on top of it.

The unfortunate reality is conventions often have outdated equipment and pretty much always have different policies. Unless a contest coordinator specifically told me anamorphic was fine, I would resize my video to have square pixels. I would still make an anamorphic mkv for the org release though.

[Phantasmagoriat]

Adding text and effects that are anamorphic safe is easy... Maybe the editor who messes this up is, I daresay, incompetent?

Call it incompetence, but I just think leaving footage at native 720x480 introduces the possibility of more errors than the average AMVer would know how to handle. For instance, even if you do what Cannonaire said, and set the PAR in your project settings, it will work for effects rendered within the program-- but when importing external effects that don't have the same AR, the effect will be resized to match, which doesn't usually look good. The only way around this would be to create the effect at 720x480 with a squished aspect, and be able to foresee how it will be stretched later on. I'd say that's way too complex for most people. Resizing beforehand is so much more straight-forward, and safer.

I agree that the first part of what you said is true, and I think that in some cases - such as mixing sources with different aspect ratios - resizing beforehand can be the best option. I completely disagree that the guide should say resizing is mandatory. When it makes sense, anamorphic is certainly the best way to go, and it's not difficult at all to do correctly. It will let you maintain the exact level of detail your source had as well as in some cases giving you a smaller file than you would have if you resized first. All you really have to do is set PAR in your project settings so effects will be right and then set PAR to the same thing when you mux.

That's true, and maybe I jumped the gun by saying resizing should be mandatory. For me, the benefits of resizing beforehand outweigh the benefits of leaving your footage at 720x480. If you're in this hobby, file size shouldn't be an issue; and minimal quality loss after resizing is negligible, especially when considering the footage will be re-compressed anyways.

I don't know why but AMVers seem to have some sort of allergy to anamorphic encoding, which makes no sense seeing as it'd be easier for convention coordinators to play back when they demand ridiculous MPEG-2 encodes on top of it.

The unfortunate reality is conventions often have outdated equipment and pretty much always have different policies. Unless a contest coordinator specifically told me anamorphic was fine, I would resize my video to have square pixels. I would still make an anamorphic mkv for the org release though.

Also, consider that if it's not in square pixels, the coordinator is more likely to screw up too.
You don't want to see your AMV on the big screen in the wrong AR :/

[Cannonaire]

..when importing external effects that don't have the same AR, the effect will be resized to match, which doesn't usually look good. The only way around this would be to create the effect at 720x480 with a squished aspect, and be able to foresee how it will be stretched later on. I'd say that's way too complex for most people. Resizing beforehand is so much more straight-forward, and safer.

I haven't had the opportunity to use premiere yet, but I know that in Vegas, everything you import as a video clip has properties in Vegas, and you can always edit the PAR in those properties. I would guess Premiere has equal functionality.

As far as it being too complex, I kinda disagree. It's not that it's too complex, but that people don't like taking extra steps or that they think it over-complicates things, and I completely understand that. Resizing to square pixels is certainly a valid option if you want to make things simpler.

My problem is with guides giving misleading or inaccurate information and passing it off as fact. The current AVTech says its own numbers for resizing aren't exact, but it doesn't give further information for those who wish to know more, and so most people end up doing something like cropping to 704x480 and resizing to 848x480.

Songbird21:
Sorry for hijacking your thread. I have a simple solution that will probably work for you. Put the following code at this link (http://pastebin.com/AtDsyN1U) into a blank text document, rename it to ntscsquare.avsi, and put it in your avisynth plugins directory. Then put this into you avisynth script:

Code: Select all

NTSCSquare(wide=true)

After that, just crop if you need to; it could be fine how it is.