by klinky » Mon Dec 30, 2002 6:10 pm
First off depends on the aspect ratio. If it's a TV series, then it needs to be resized to a 4:3 resolution. If it is one of those you can resize to any of these sizes:
640x480 576x432 512x384 448x336 384x288 320x240
There are a couple more as well that would work...
You're limited with most codecs to sizes that are divisable by 16.
If it's not 4:3 TV footage then you're either going to deal with widescreen anamorphic footage, or widescreen letterboxed footage.
If it's letterboxed, you'll see black bars below and above the image. If it's anamorphic, it will look stretched out.
Anamorphic footage needs to be resized to the proper aspect ratio. You can usually find that on the DVD case or by playing it in a DVD player application.
Non-anamorphic footage, you can just crop the black bars off of and then resize just the video.
As for sizes that you can resize to, it depends on how big the video is after cropping. It still needs to be divisable by 16.
Doom9 has a old resolution list at the bottom of <a href="http://www.doom9.org/bitrate_guide.htm#res">this</a> page.
~klinky