Maintaining 1.78 AR?

[delanejenkins]

To my understanding the 1.78 aspect ratio is the only one which will completely fill a 16:9 display with no black bars. I know we remove the black bars by cropping and resizing with the "suggest resolution" box checked. With these settings the output AR is now 2.35 and I still have black bars on my tv.

What can I do for my finished video to fill my screen with no black bars?

[nurbs]

You either crop the sides of the video or you stretch it till it's 16:9. Both are bad choices since the movie simply isn't 16:9 and you should just live with that.

[delanejenkins]

Will I be losing any quality from my video by cropping the sides? I know I will be cutting out that portion of the view but I can deal with that because I would be losing it anyway when I hit zoom on my 16:9 plasma to remove the bars.

The way I am doing it is by choosing autocrop, then resizing choosing "suggest resolution" for 1280 x ***, then taking the vertical resolution it suggests (544) and multiplying that by 1.78 which gives me a new horizontal resolution (968). I take the new horizontal resolution and subtract it from 1280 and divide it two 1280-968/2=156). I go back up and crop the right and left side by that. I then change my resize selection back to 1280x720 and uncheck "suggest resolution".

The AR looks correct to me when I do this. Am I oversimplifying this in any way or is this ok with the exception of losing a little of my video field?

[yetanotherid]

The way you're doing it sounds fine to me, assuming whichever program you're using gets the suggested resolution correct in the first place. Does the program have a smart cop feature as part of, or separately to, autocrop? It's just that the first crop method may only crop non-picture areas, whereas the second will perform extra cropping to maintain aspect ratio. Assuming you're converting a DVD with a 2.35 aspect ratio, then if your example of 1280x544 is a suggested resolution, you're actually getting a display resolution of 2.31
That's mightn't mean it's got it wrong. I've only used a couple of different programs, but in the case of AutoGK it'd automatically over-ride your cropping selection by cropping whatever else it needs to from the sides of the image (usually not much) so as not to alter the aspect ratio. In the case of StaxRip when you open the cropping dialogue you can autocrop or smartcrop. Smartcrop will do the same sort of thing AutoGK does automatically except it'll crop from the top and bottom which I don't like. What I'm basically wondering is if your calculations, based on "suggested resolution" are based on the actual resolution you should/will end up with if you kept the whole video. Aside from that, the math seems okay to me.

Do you see a difference in quality between using the zoom function of your TV and encoding with the sides cropped off? Personally, I'd keep the full video and use the zoom function unless the resizing that way is bad enough for you to see a reduction in quality. Have you encoded each way and compared to two?

[MysticE]

Do you see a difference in quality between using the zoom function of your TV and encoding with the sides cropped off? Personally, I'd keep the full video and use the zoom function unless the resizing that way is bad enough for you to see a reduction in quality. Have you encoded each way and compared to two?
Playing around with regular DVDs encoding with the crop produces a better pic than zooming. I was playing around with a large high quality x264 file and ran it through ConvertXtoDVD3 3 ways. LetterBox (original is 2.4), their Automatic (about 1.85 crop 86/86) and finally Pan & Scan (no bars at all crop 170/170).

[delanejenkins]

Thanks for the advice guys. I've been playing around with it and it does appear the cropped quality is better than zooming on the tv. What I did run into though is that if you have any titles or text than fill the screen they are cut off using the crop method. With that being said I guess I will stick with just zooming