Rebuilder's 4:3 to 16:9 is wonderful.

[nwg]

I was going to get the new version of The Thing which is anamorphic. I found out that the only different will be the transfer, the extras will be the same.

Therefore, I decided to convert my old DVD of The Thing using the 4:3-16:9 feature on the film. The results were fantastic. The picture is really nice to look at.

I have decided to do the same thing with the original DVD version of The X Files film rather than buy the second version of it.

I have a French film called Taxi. This is also non anamorphic but, the subs are burned in the black border under the film. If, I do the same with this, will the subs appear off the screen (I have a widescreen TV)?

[wmansir]

If they are part of the image (not selectable) they probably will be cut off. There might be some AVS tricks you could do to get them superimposed on to the anamorphic image, but I haven't seen it done, just guessing it could be possible using the commands available (if the subs are entirely contained on the LB boarder and don't overlay the original image).

[nwg]

I think I will try it anyway.

[wmansir]

You can always open up one of the .avs files in a media player and see what the image looks like before you waste several hours encoding. The image will be resized and cropped at that point.

[nwg]

You can always open up one of the .avs files in a media player and see what the image looks like before you waste several hours encoding. The image will be resized and cropped at that point.

Thanks for the pointer.

It wouldn't take too long to encode as the DVD is a DVD-5 anyway. I would just use Quenc 1 pass mode.

[archaeo]

would you mind explaining to a noob what 4:3 to 16:9 conversion does?

I saw this in the RB settings:
Convert from LB 4:3 to 16:9- Allows you to convert select Video Title Sets from 4:3 Letterbox to 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen. This is only recommended if you have a widescreen display

Can this conversion be applied to any movies? Does this feature crop the picture so that image quality may be improved? I've got a few poor VHS transfers that I was thinking of applying this to try to improve viewability...

thanks

[wmansir]

This option crops the top and bottom off the picture and then resizes the letterbox portion to fit the whole screen.

So this:http://www.widescreen.org/images/st4_43_nonanam.jpg

Becomes: http://www.widescreen.org/images/st4_43_anam.jpg

You only want to apply this to letterboxed movies. Normal full screen video will have part of the image cropped off.

You can't really gain quality, in fact there will probably be a slight quality loss. This comes from 2 factors: 1. The resize function will affect video quality and 2. because the picture takes up more of the screen it contains more data and will require a higher bitrate to acheive the same quality as a LB picture.

I wouldn't recommend this for people with 'standard' 4:3 TVs because you don't gain anything (the picture is still displayed as letterboxed). There are benifits for those with widescreen TVs, which is what anamorphic (16:9) discs are intended for, but of course the results aren't as good as an original anamorphic disc.

[nwg]

I tested the first couple of m2V's and the subs are cut off. I forgot that the subs are one two lines so the bottom line is missing. As the subs are so big, I have to move the image up on the TV and crop the top just so I can see all the subs.

Looks like I have to try and and get a proper anamorphic copy from somewhere. Luckily the sequal is anamorphic.

I did The X Files and that looks excellent as well. It may not have actual better quality but, on my TV it still looks better than being zoomed. With The X Files I could see the scanlines when zoomed.

[archaeo]

You can't really gain quality, in fact there will probably be a slight quality loss

wmansir,

thanks for the explanation, it was not what I thought it was...


-a

[Lagoon]

You can actually gain "virtual" quality if you use a sharpening resizer in avisynth (ie lanczos) but I'm not sure if DVD-RB use this one.

You could also use strong sharpening filters, but they are kinda slow..

[jdobbs]

Originally posted by archaeo
would you mind explaining to a noob what 4:3 to 16:9 conversion does?

I saw this in the RB settings:


Can this conversion be applied to any movies? Does this feature crop the picture so that image quality may be improved? I've got a few poor VHS transfers that I was thinking of applying this to try to improve viewability...

thanks There really is nothing (beyond a couple really good filters on some very specific source problems) that can improve the original picture. This feature allows you to turn a letterboxed 4:3 source into an anamorphic 16:9 so you can enjoy it on newer 16:9 televisions. It has very little positive or negative affect on picture quality (it uses the highly praised LanczosResize() filter that is inherent in AVISYNTH).

Added: As for the impact of the cropping, you get mixed results. Sometimes removing the black space makes the picture compress better, sometimes not. It really depends on where it ends and whether the edge of the black space falls in the middle of a macroblock.

Also added: I need to be more careful to read all the responses carefully, as I've pretty much just repeated what wmansir said... so, uhh... I agree.

[solvalou]

Hmmm.. how exactly can I use it in a poorly made progressive source (with combed frames) or on pure interlaced sources ? Because I tried using it on the first case and what happened is that the resize filter ended up increasing the size of the comb effect on interlaced frames making it visible on TV.

Is this option only to be used on pure progressive sources with no combed frames ?

[wmansir]

If your source is detected as interlaced it will be resized in a special way to prevent blending the fields (which makes the combing effect visible on TVs). This resize method doesn't produce as sharp a picture as a simple progressive frame resize, so I wouldn't recommend it unless the material truly is interlaced.

If your source only has a few interlaced frames DVD-RB will probably detect it as progressive and treat it as such, so those few frames will be resized improperly. You could try running the entire stream thru a smart deinterlacer (like the one DVD-RB uses for interlaced material, Decomb's fieldDeinterlace), but it would have to be done manually or using DVD-RB's filter editor because you can't force DVD-RB to treat a source as interlaced.

PS. for more info you can check out this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77970). Not totally about your questions, but on this topic.

[solvalou]

You could try running the entire stream thru a smart deinterlacer (like the one DVD-RB uses for interlaced material, Decomb's fieldDeinterlace), but it would have to be done manually or using DVD-RB's filter editor because you can't force DVD-RB to treat a source as interlaced.

Can I simply add a
Telecide(order=1,guide=1)
Decimate(cycle=5)
in the advanced filter settings ?

[wmansir]

You can't do that because DVD-RB doesn't support IVTC.