cropping in virtual dub

[mike97gt]

Now this question may seem a bit odd. But I have been thinking, why do I have to crop my movies? I usually crop all the black off my movies and leave nothing but the video. The reason I have been doing this is so that if I ever get a widescreen tv, it will not show any black around the film. Sometimes I have problems with DivX 4 and VD not liking certain crops and totally screwing up my movies. That's the reason I want to stop cropping. Also, I opened a cropped movie in Power DVD on my PC, and when going full screen, it literally went full screen cutting off most of the picture. So, if I leave the black bars on my movies, will it show up using a widescreen (16:9) tv?

[bb]

You have to crop off the black bars, because the sharp edges between the black bars and the movie unnecessarily take up a lot of bandwidth. That means you'll get much worse quality at the same bitrate or filesize.

Keep in mind: It's the edges, not the bars themselves, which eat the bits, so don't leave a single black pixel line when cropping! It's better to crop a few pixels into the movie, if you need to fit a multiple of 16 or 32 in vertical / horizontal size.

bb