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Main => Everything Else => Topic started by: ErikRuud on April 29, 2005, 08:44:19 pm

Title: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: ErikRuud on April 29, 2005, 08:44:19 pm

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?

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: maraxle on April 30, 2005, 08:46:39 am

Try TMPGEnc (http://www.tmpgenc.net).  If that doesn't work, check out www.videohelp.com.

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: ErikRuud on April 30, 2005, 10:32:06 am

Hey, thanks Maraxle.

I did find this: Video Perspective (http://www.riverpast.com/en/prod/videoperspective/index.php) 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.

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: daywane on April 30, 2005, 02:11:10 pm

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

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: CheffoJeffo on April 30, 2005, 02:23:28 pm

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.

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: ErikRuud on May 04, 2005, 11:44:49 am

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.  :o

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.

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: ErikRuud on May 12, 2005, 10:28:53 am

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.

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: daywane on May 12, 2005, 10:58:26 am

just curious
how many hrs to convert?

Title: Re: Letterbox Utility?
Post by: ErikRuud on May 12, 2005, 12:49:42 pm

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.