Resizing and cropping my HD caps

[zeus163]

I was able to use some posts on AVS forum to allow me to tape from my Comcast HD digital cable box (Motorolla series). I finally figured out how to get the .ts files accepted in DGIndex and now would like to resize and encode these to store on a DVDR. I have several scripts that I want to try, but there is something I'm trying to do that I can't figure out. I taped Jimmy Eat World last night on Conan off of the HD station. Even though this wasn't an HD broadcast, it still looked better than the analog station. The capture was still at 1920x1080 though. However, on the left and right side of the screen there are borders. What I'd like to do when I resize to 720X480 is to remove the black borders on the left and right side of the screen and stretch/enlarge so that instead of the borders, it just fills the whole screen. I hope that makes sense. I've played around here for a couple of hours, but since I'm pretty much still a noobie dabbler I can't get it to do what I want.

TIA!

[iantri]

OK. I'll admit I don't really know anything about HDTV, so if I am wrong somebody please correct me!

You COULD count the pixels on each side to do the cropping (or use VirtualDub's crop tool to find out), but let's see:

By doing the math (1920/1080) we discover that appearently HDTV uses square pixels. HDTV has an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. (1920/1080 = ~1.78 16/9 = ~1.78). A 4:3 image has an aspect ratio of 1.33, if we know that the picture is 1.33 times wider than tall we can do 1080*1.33 = 1436. So the 4:3 image area should be more or less 1436x1080.

We can now employ crop:

Crop(242,0,-242,0) # chop off 484 total -- 1436+484=1920.

Since it is an interlaced image (1080i), you'll need to do something about that. If it is from film, you'll need to do an inverse telecine and resize.

Telecide()
Decimate(cycle=5)
LanczosResize(720,480)

.. will probably do.

If it is from video than it is a bit more difficult.. You can't really resize interlaced material easily. Get KernelDeint (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=81322). Use KernelBob (it will output double the framerate). Check the docs for details. After that, you can do the resize and recreate the interlaced video:

LanczosResize(720,480)
SeparateFields()
Selectevery(4,1,2)
Weave()

Hope there aren't any errors in there. :)

[zeus163]

Thanks for the cropping help. That worked exactly like i wanted it to. Beautiful. I'm looking at your other ideas as well and they are very similar to what I've been looking at when searching through posts (I finally gave up at 3 AM last night after reading several variants of bobs and Scharfis_brains ideas).

I use Kernelbob() for my PAL to NTSC conversions, but when I was using it on these clips it was erroring out on me when the script was imported into CCE. I'm guessing that I need to tell it what fps I want.

Once again, thanks. I'll continue to tinker and come up with a good solution that allows me to simply change the new d2v files locations.