Letterbox Utility?

[ErikRuud]

Here is the situation:

I have a video that is 640 x 368.  If I try to burn this to a DVD it gets stretched vertically to a 4:3 aspect ratio which makes things look tall and skinny. I own a copy of Roxio Easy Media Creator 7, but is has no options for dforcing the aspect ratio.  It wil strech/squash any video clip to 4:3.

Is there a utility that I can use to add letterboxing to thei clip so that it is 640 x 480 before I bring it into EMC7?

[maraxle]

Try TMPGEnc.  If that doesn't work, check out www.videohelp.com.

[ErikRuud]

Hey, thanks Maraxle.

I did find this: Video Perspective that is supposed to be able to do it.  It did, but it took four tries to get what I wanted, and even then the re-encoding introduced a lot of noise to the images.

I 'll follow up on your suggestions.

[daywane]

I find all my video answers here.
http://www.doom9.org/

[CheffoJeffo]

I deal with stuff like this pretty regularly ... typically would have problems with DivX/XViD encoded files in 16:9. I use the Resize filter in VirtualDub to add letterbox borders to bring it to 4:3 and then burn to DVD.

Works like a charm (although some versions of VirtualDub have trouble with variable bit rate audio tracks).

Cheers.

[ErikRuud]

It looks like VirtualDub is the answer.

I gave it a quick try last night and it pretty easy to do what I want.

I did a quick test just using the Resize filter, and it did exactly what I wanted without introducing a lot of extra noise.  The only problem is that it wants to take my 3.5Gig compressed divx file and output as a 58.0Gig uncomprressed avi. 

Now I just need to do a little more research on how to use VirtualDub and I'll be good to go.

Thanks for all the help.

[ErikRuud]

Just in case anyone cares.

VirtualDub did the job.

I did have to export the audio to a .wav file because the VBR encoding in the original avi was causing the sound to get out of sync.

I also got the best results by letting it create the letterboxed file without compression.  That gave me the least video noise on the final DVD.

Thanks again for the advice.

[daywane]

just curious
how many hrs to convert?

[ErikRuud]

The source is 45 minutes long at 640x368.

It took about 35-40 minutes to convert to 640x480 letterboxed on my 1.6ghz Duron machine.