Joining 2.35:1 to 16:9

[markessa]

Help! I'm trying to join some clips together. Some are 2.35:1 and others are 4:3. I've ripped them all to 640x480 and they play fine. However, when I join them with Edit Studio the widescreen content loses the black bars and stretches to the full height of my monitor. How can I rip this content so that the black bars become part of the content. I am assuming that this will fix my original problem.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

If these are .AVIs, you can create permanent "black bars" as follows: (In VirtualDub, set "Video" to "Full Processing Mode" and "Audio" to "Direct Stream Copy")

1) Load you video into VirtualDub
2) From the "Video" dropdown menu, click on "Filters", then click on the "Add" radio button and doubleclick on the "Resize" filter
3) Set "New width" and "New height" to the SAME resolution as your original .AVI (In this example, I'm assuming it's 720x480)
4) Put a checkmark in the box labelled "Expand frame and letterbox image - and enter a multiple of 16 in "Frame height" (Increasing the initial height by perhaps 208, or 192 to approximate 16:9 - which, in this example, will mean increasing the height from 480 to 688 or 672)
5) Click on "OK" to return to the "Filters" window
6) Once again, doubleclick on the "Resize" filter
7) Set "New height" to 480 (This will reduce the ENTIRE image, including the black bars to 480 pixels of vertical resolution). Click on "OK" until you get back to the main VirtualDub window
8) Save with a new filename

[markessa]

a couple of questions though:

1. when it's setup there should be two
items in the filters box?

2. it must be saved in Full processing mode?

Thats a lot of disk space but worth it if it works.
I've been pulling my hair out over this project for
a month now.

[setarip_old]

1) No - Only the "Resize" filter (That you'll select two times)

2) Yes - but if you select the same video codec (and settings for it) that you used to originally create the .AVI, the filesize shouldn't be very different than the original

[markessa]

I think my version of virtualdub is different than yours.
Steps 1 -4 match perfectly. However, when i click OK in
step 5 it brings me back to the Filters box with a line that says
640x480 640x688 resize
If i doubleclick on that it brings up the same window i just
filled out. If I go back to Add and doubleclick Resize again
and change the new height number as per step 7 it creates
a 2nd item in the filters box that says
640x688 640x480 resize

Also, the divx file size jumps from 88 megs to 7 gigs.

[setarip_old]

Also, the divx file size jumps from 88 megs to 7 gigs.Again, if you select the same video codec (and settings for it) that you used to originally create the .AVI, the filesize shouldn't be very different than the original

[markessa]

I've managed to resize the original 720x368 to 640x480 but the quality is terrible now. I've tried smoothing and deinterlacing but nothing seems to help.
Compression is Divx 6.4.0 Theatre 1-pass quality based(2), extreme quality.

Any suggestions?