Upsizing vs. Anamorphic?

[agressiv]

Lanczos4Resize(864,384)

vs.

Lanczos4Resize(720,384)

Taking an NTSC 480p Anamorophic DVD, and resizing it (unstretching it essentially in the top choice)

Is it technically better to keep it Anamorphic within MP4/MKV or is upsizing it producing a similar result? Or is this a personal preference, and thus just an "opinion"?

agressiv

[bkman]

I think keeping it anamorphic is better as you are not gaining any quality with the upsizing, but just giving the encoder more pixels to encode which will reduce quality in two pass. It will be upscaled at playback anyway, though not with lanczos4.

[Dams]

Do you read it on a Home Player or on computer ?

[quake74]

Well, isn't this an old discussion? You'll find plenty of opinions, but the one I like is http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=568512#post568512.

The problem is at some point the video will need to be stretched to fit your display, and who do you trust more: avisynth, your dvd/divx player, your software player, your tv? And if I change dvd player? And if a new version of limitedsharped/seesaw comes out which is just so much better? And if I upgrade to HD? There is a similar problem for interlaced material: should I keep it interlaced and deinterlace it in real time when I watch it, or should I use mvbob at 3fps and make it progressive once and for all?

[Awatef]

@ agressiv
As bkman said, upsizing won't bring any new details, and make it slower to encode and slower to decode, so avoid it as much as you can (the guys wondering about hardware resizers are superstitious IMHO).
As for keeping the source anamorphic, you don't need to resize at all! Just use the crop command to remove the black bars.
In your case, it will look similiar to this:
Crop(0,96,720,384)
And then you specify an AR of 2,35 or similar (2,22 in your case?) when muxing your MKV.

[Didée]

@ Awatef
It's not a matter of supersticiousness. But it's a matter of how accurate you want or need to have your stuff done.

Truth is, however, that if you step just one or two steps back from your usual viewing position, then a crappy 352ish rip and a shiny HD source might look not too different from each other .... :)

(One might satisfy a customer with a cost estimate that was calculated with using just "3" instead of Pi - but that doesn't mean that Pi should be replaced by "3" generally ...)

[agressiv]

Thanks for the thread referral. When I did search I was looking for something like that, but with so many results that I didnt want, I just gave up and started a new thread.

I'm running 1080p from a PC (its overscanned, grrr) over DVI. I use ZoomPlayer to reduce the viewable area (otherwise everything would go off-screen).

So I guess a lot of post-processing is already being done. I'm tired of having to change the various aspect ratios every time I change source. (1.85:1, 2.35:1) What I haven't messed with is setting the PAR through the muxer before.

agressiv

[Awatef]

@ agressiv
You could always use ffdshow as decoder and enable Lanczos resizing there if you're looking for the last bit of definition...