Adding letterboxing post-production

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AngelOfTheDark
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Adding letterboxing post-production

Post by AngelOfTheDark » Sat Mar 17, 2007 1:56 am

I finally finished my video! :D I'm so pleased with it, and I have just one more question. Four attempts to contact him later, the coordinator of the AMV contest I'm entering finally wrote me back. He recommends adding letterboxing to my footage, since it is widescreen (Miyazki's Spirited Away, to be exact). My original plan was to simply save the video in 4:3 ratio (my program then automatically adds letterboxing) That was fine until I got to the parts where I used a still frame. In those spots, even though in the preview screen it looked fine, in the final product, the images were stretched vertically to look full screen. This was remedied by rendering the project with a 16:9 aspect ratio, but this again leaves me without the letterboxing.

Of course, I could always use my video as source footage, stick the entire thing in the editor again, and save it in 4:3, but this, of course lowers the quality some. I normally wouldn't have as much of a problem with a slight quality loss, but this is for a convention, so I'm being anal.

Is there a way to add letterboxing to an already rendered video (It's in DV format, if it helps.)

For the record, the contest is accepting videos in:

MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Huffy, DV, Xvid or Uncompressed

if that information is of any help.

Thanks so much for the help.
"They say that there is no medicine that can cure a fool... I guess that's true." (Potion shop's old woman- LoZ OoT)

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Post by JaddziaDax » Sat Mar 17, 2007 4:12 am

do you know how to use avisynth?

if your video is already at a widescreen format use this in your avs script it will put the black border on the top and the bottom then resize it to full screen...


addborders(0,50,0,50)
LanczosResize(640,480)

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JaddziaDax
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Post by JaddziaDax » Sat Mar 17, 2007 4:12 am

ps open the script in virtualdub mod and export as you would any other file

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AngelOfTheDark
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Post by AngelOfTheDark » Sat Mar 17, 2007 4:29 pm

That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure since I'm not using it as source footage, so I wasn't sure if it would have a weird effect. I'll give it a shot, thanks.
"They say that there is no medicine that can cure a fool... I guess that's true." (Potion shop's old woman- LoZ OoT)

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AngelOfTheDark
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Post by AngelOfTheDark » Sat Mar 17, 2007 5:02 pm

Sorry for the double-post, but do I save it in .avi? Then what do I do to make sure it's in a proper format for the contest?
"They say that there is no medicine that can cure a fool... I guess that's true." (Potion shop's old woman- LoZ OoT)

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Post by JaddziaDax » Sat Mar 17, 2007 6:55 pm

you can export it as a huffy or XVID... (which the con accepts)

if you want a MPEG take the huffy and convert it to mpeg the same way you made the original...

ps. always make a high quality cleaned "master coppy" that you can modify whenever you need it

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Post by Kionon » Sat Mar 17, 2007 9:29 pm

Vdubmod has a add borders features to, in case a gui is more desirable. It works just as well as the avisynth one.
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AngelOfTheDark
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Post by AngelOfTheDark » Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:12 am

Actually, I forgot about the encoding for convention guide. I'm using that now, but I have another question. I've deinterlaced, resized, added borders & all that jazz, now I just need to encode it.

The problem is that it says I need to download the Otaku Video general submission TMPGEnc profile, but when I click on the link all I get is a page of computer code. There's nothing to download. I thought maybe I was supposed to save it as a .txt doc, but that didn't work. Is there another link or something? Am I supposed to do something with the code? Stick it in Netbeans, or something?
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Post by Scintilla » Sun Mar 18, 2007 8:03 am

AngelOfTheDark wrote:The problem is that it says I need to download the Otaku Video general submission TMPGEnc profile, but when I click on the link all I get is a page of computer code. There's nothing to download. I thought maybe I was supposed to save it as a .txt doc, but that didn't work. Is there another link or something? Am I supposed to do something with the code? Stick it in Netbeans, or something?
Right-click the link and select Save As... (or Save Link As... or whatever).

It should save as an .MCF file, though you're absolutely right in that the file is no more than a standard ASCII file. If you already saved it as a .TXT file, you should be able to just change the extension to .MCF and have it work.
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Post by TaranT » Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:46 am

I believe the Otaku Video files were originally Zip'd. We need to know which contest this is in order to check.

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