Whats the pros and cons of cropping?

[odwoh]

Whats the pros and cons of cropping?
ie. should or shouldn't?

[dragoman]

Hi,

Well, a couple things:

1) By cropping, you are reducing your actual resolution and therefore, the size of the file you will get.

2) The edge of the black lines typically do not line up to actual macroblocks (what I mean is that the black line is sometimes in the middle of a 8x8 block of pixels) which can really jack up the bitrate required to encode this. Of course, more bitrate here, less elsewhere....

3) A 16:9 resolution movie when viewed on a computer monitor or tv will have black bars anyway, so why waste space encoding them?

Gknot has a very good frontend for avisynth which you can use to crop your movie easily. My personal choice is always 640x272 for a 16:9 resolution.

dragoman

[mwillberg]

My personal choice is always 640x272 for a 16:9 resolution.

I hope that's just a typo, otherwise you are getting really bad aspect ratio. 640x272 is the usual resolution for cinemascope, that is 2.35:1, not 16:9 (1.85:1)...

edit: typo, not type

[dragoman]

Hi,

Okay, how about a widescreen movie then?

Of course I am aware that 640x272 is not 16:9....this is after cropping! I crop the black bars. 16:9 resolution is actually 640x360.

Sorry for not being more precise....

dragoman