aspect ratio conversions

[KLin]

Has anyone taken a 2.35:1 AR video and converted it to 1.78:1 before? I'm basically wanting to take an anamorphic video and eliminate the horizontal black bars.

I know I'll have to crop the sides of the video too to make sure the video doesn't looked stretched.

I haven't been successful in finding much information on the calculations to use. I'm using avisynth to do the cropping and resolution resizing. Thanks!

 

[KLin]

nevermind on this. I guess you just need to crop the same amount of pixels on the sides to make the conversion.

 

[cubby1223]

Why? You're probably going to get some bad looking scenes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and_scan

 

[Atomic Playboy]

It's easiest to crop an equal number of pixels on both sides, but it's by no means the "best" way to do this; the key information in a scene is not always squarely in the middle. By doing a simple side crop, you could be eliminating details that are more important than what you're focusing the frame on. As such, the only good way to do this is to go through and crop it scene by scene, and occasionally even frame by frame, to be sure you're getting the best possible focus for every shot. Of course this process would take months, which I'm assuming you don't want to devote to a project like this, so again, your best bet would be to do an equal crop.

But the real question is why on Earth would you want to do this? The resulting video, given the problems you may have with not getting truly centered on the action in a scene, will probably be considerably more annoying to watch than any black bars could be.

 

[Shawn]

Just press the zoom button on your TV.

 

[bobdole369]

Just press the zoom button on your TV.

Why are bars so annoying to folks? I'd rather have a properly proportioned picture than something stretched, or if zoomed - missing off the side of the screen.

 

[Tegeril]

Originally posted by: bobdole369

Just press the zoom button on your TV.

Why are bars so annoying to folks? I'd rather have a properly proportioned picture than something stretched, or if zoomed - missing off the side of the screen.

This.

 

[KLin]

Originally posted by: bobdole369

Just press the zoom button on your TV.

Why are bars so annoying to folks? I'd rather have a properly proportioned picture than something stretched, or if zoomed - missing off the side of the screen.

It's for watching video on a mobile device. The bars never bothered me, but I figured the bars might be annoying on a mobile device(PSP, Iphone, etc).