Help with DVD editing

simbot82 · **3rd April 2007, 02:45 AM**

Ok my copies of Lord of the Rings EE all have the crappy 2.35:1 resolution so I have ugly black bars at top and bottom. What program can I use to remove these black bars and how do I go about it?

Cheers

logifuse · **4th April 2007, 05:50 PM**

I take it you want to crop to 16:9 (i.e. zoom in to fill the screen with no aspect ratio funnies)?

As I understand it, it's not as simple a process as you might think (I've been trying to get 4:3 content recorded on a 16:9 channel cropped to create a genuine 4:3 DVD).

I've mucked around with IFOEdit to change the headers when I've had 16:9 footage that was incorrectly squashed to 4:3, but that's not exactly what you're after, however there may be a way of making the image zoom automatically.

Before you go too far down the path however, just remember that you'll actually be extracting a pretty low res image. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the DVD is 720x576 that is stretched to 16:9 (i.e. rectangular pixels) & of that 576 lines, you're losing a stack to the black of letterboxing. If you punch a 16:9 centre cut out of the 2.35:1 (& don't include any letterboxing), it's going to be seriously low res (maybe around 480x320 stretched to 16:9 - that's a very rough guess). Edit: my new rough calc is 544x436 stretched to 16:9. Not that bad, but not great.

What does the MCE zoom function do with the DVD now?

Justin

AdrianW · **4th April 2007, 11:11 PM**

If you really want to chop off the sides of the image just so you can fill your screen, just use the zoom setting in MCE (Zoom 2 should do it).

But why do you want to chop off the sides?

The best option is to turn down the lights in the room and pretend your screen is really 2.35:1 instead of 1.78:1.

2.35:1 isn't crappy. Don't you love it at the movies, when after the ads and trailers, the curtains open up even wider just before the movie starts? That's because they're increasing the aspect ratio up to 2.35:1 to fit the movie. I'd be pretty annoyed if they just chopped off the sides - you'll end up losing characters off the edges.

CraigMBecket · **6th April 2007, 02:26 AM**

simbot82,

Its possible the other respondents have misunderstood you, are you talking about the fact you can see a difference between the black of the "black bar" and the "native black" of your TV? That is you can see two blackish bands at the top and two blackish bands at the bottom of your screen, a result of the encoded black band not being quite as black as the screen is capable of producing? If so there are lots of programs that allow you to crop the bands before encoding into say avi files. I use virtualdubmod to crop them from my ripped and prepared files.

The process I use to go from DVD to high quality avi comes from a posting on the web that goes by the wonderful name of "Encoding DVDs to High Quality Movie files with Xvid and AC3" do a google/yahoo search for it if you are interested.

Craig.