Malcolm X - PAL DVD Mastering

[CFL]

If anybody has backed up this DVD they will know what i am talking about when I say that this is one of the worst mastered DVD's I have ever seen. First of all it is a 4:3 DVD, but it is in 1.85:1 widescreen. The film starts off fine but in parts of the movie the horizontal size changes. I'm not talking about mm, its more like a couple of cm's each side of the picture and then it will change back to its full widescreen and so on and so throughout the film. So since it is 4:3 i guess they are relying on the TV to pan and scan and the differences at the sides of the DVD picture would not be noticed. Sorry for my rant or if this is in the wrong forum. My question is... should I encode this movie (divX) in it widest possible (around 1.85:1)or it narrowest (could be close to 1.33 full screen (what a joke!))? Thanks in advance for your replies.

[xzquala]

why not encode each chunk seperately, making a new avi every time that they changed the mastering format, and then when burning to a disk (or whatever) put a playlist on the disk (you can even set the autorun file to open the playlist). that way you will get the most out of (almost) every world.

only one problem this way, getting a proper 2 pass encode.

you are going to have to allot each chunk a certain amount of space on your disk. off the top of my head, I can't think of a really good way to do that.

[CFL]

Thats a good idea. Might try that. Thanks for the reply. ;)

[tenebrenz]

for this sort of thing I would use avisynth, there you can cut the film into chunks, crop and resize each part seperately, put it back together and feed the whole thing to an encoder.

[TheWEF]

Originally posted by tenebrenz
for this sort of thing I would use avisynth, there you can cut the film into chunks, crop and resize each part seperately, put it back together and feed the whole thing to an encoder.

you cannot put parts together that have different ar...

i would crop so that you do not have black bars 90% of the time and live with them for the rest of it.

wef.

[CFL]

That is what I have had to do. I encoded at it widest possible and results were just rubbish. The black bars down the side were very noticeable. So I am now just going to encode it at its narrowest with no bars - So instead of 1.85:1 I have now got 1.78:1 - I think I can live with that. Thanks for the hints and help.