Widescreen DVD

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Widescreen DVD

Postby Red Wolf » Sun Aug 18, 2002 11:31 am

I've gone through ErMaC's guide and the others but I'm not finding the numbers I need so thus I am posting.

Background: I'm ripping scenes from my Princess Mononoke DVD which is in 720x480 16:9 format. I use a Mac and have ripped plenty of non-widescreen DVDs before with no problem because my ripping software goes to those aspects by default.

Problem: I can rip the DVD and even adjust the video stream for the right aspect ratio in my editing program (Final Cut Pro). But when I go to compress that into MPEG-1 I either get the wrong aspect ratio or very poor quality video (looks fine at normal size but if you blow it up it looks horrible compared to other MPEG-1s I've made).

Question: What width and height do I use to ripped a 16:9 aspect ration video so that it keeps that aspect purely because of the size of the video stream?

Any addition comments or suggestions are of course welcomed. Thank you for your time and help.
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Postby ErMaC » Sun Aug 18, 2002 11:43 am

Not sure I quite understand your question. If you want to resize your final product to be non-anamorphic, but you edited in 29.97fps, you're f*cked, because your source is now interlaced and you're gonna be trying to resize interlaced video and it'll look like crap.

But in order to convert your resolution to the right one, you just take 16:9 and apply it to whatever your horizontal resolution is...

For instance... 720x480 becomes:
720 x 9 / 16 = 360
720x360

if you have edited in interlaced and want to resize down to normal aspect ratio, you will need to Inverse Telecine first and THEN resize, or deinterlace and then resize.
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Postby Red Wolf » Sun Aug 18, 2002 12:38 pm

Okay, then it must be the interlacing giving me the problem I'm currently having. I'm going through some Mac DVD -> VCD guides right now (same concept as ripping for AMV, just minus the sound) so I'll see if they offer tricks since they use the same decoder I do. I'll get back to y'all on this. Thanks for the post, ErMaC.
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Postby ErMaC » Sun Aug 18, 2002 12:54 pm

Hey wolf I'd love to distro my AMVs on your little CD thingy but I'm currently not in a position to make them MPEGs because the originals are on my home computer. All I have are XviD AVIs. Would you mind distroing those or do you only want to accept MPEGs?
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Postby NicholasDWolfwood » Sun Aug 18, 2002 12:57 pm

I also want to you to distribute my one video. It's in MPEG-1. 35.3MB, VCD format MPEG.
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Postby René D´Anclaude » Sun Aug 18, 2002 4:04 pm

ErMaC wrote:For instance... 720x480 becomes:
720 x 9 / 16 = 360
720x360


errr, are you sure about that?
Actually (if my calculator doesn´t cheat me) it should be 720x405, right?
Or am I missing something?
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Postby NicholasDWolfwood » Sun Aug 18, 2002 4:22 pm

He is wrong, as I got the same thing. 720x405.
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Postby Cailet730 » Sun Aug 18, 2002 4:30 pm

Hey wolf I'd love to distro my AMVs on your little CD thingy but I'm currently not in a position to make them MPEGs because the originals are on my home computer. All I have are XviD AVIs. Would you mind distroing those or do you only want to accept MPEGs?


ErMaC: If he does only accept mpegs, I think I have a couple of the mpg versions of your videos that I downloaded off your website months ago. FYI, in case you want them.
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Postby Cailet730 » Sun Aug 18, 2002 5:23 pm

*rethinks* oh, your probably talking about the newest ones. nevermind.
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Postby ErMaC » Mon Aug 19, 2002 1:51 am

Yes I was hoping to include my newer vids which I never encoded to MPEG1.

As for the math thing - yes you guys are right, I screwed up the initial number. 720x360 is still the resolution you want though, here's why:

TV is 3:2 in terms of pixels, and 4:3 in terms of aspect ratio. That's why 720/480 doesn't reduce to 4/3.
This means that in order to find out the aspect ratio correction from 4:3 to 16:9 is to first convert the 3:2 to 4:3, then convert the 4:3 to 16:9, and convert back the horizontal direction. Example:

720x480 = 3/2
in 4/3 aspect ratio (i.e. square pixels!) it would be:
640x480

640 x 9 / 16 = 360

stretch the horizontal back out again to 720 and you get 720x360.
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Postby Red Wolf » Tue Aug 20, 2002 9:27 am

While I'm prefering MPEG-1s I will certainly be happy to take a look at the AVIs. My concern, being a Mac guy, was universal access to all the videos. Shoot me an email letting me know which videos you would like (and where they are if not on your web page) on the CD and I'll see what I can do. I'm probably going to move to a double CD set so I can get more videos from submitters out there.

As for the original topic here's an update.

As I said, I have done DVD ripping and MPEG-1 encoding for AMV videos in the past with no problem. Those were using DVDs set to standard TV aspect ratio. I ripped the files, converted them to DV stream (required for the editor) and editing them using iMovie. I exported out using a commercial VCD plug-in and got good (though not great) results. iMovie doesn't support 16:9 aspect ratio so I was going to use this video to learn Final Cut Pro.

I extracted the DVD like any other. I then tried decoding it so it would keep the ratio and de-interlace. That sucked so I simply ripped the video and resized it without a set aspect ratio. That sucked. I finally just ripped it as if it was a 4:3 DVD and edited and compressed it in iMovie just like I have done in the past. That should have looked fine except for the skinny anime characters but that sucked. Frankly I'm at a loss as to whether the problem is the decoder (I've used two different ones for the Mac) and/or Final Cut Pro (I can't see to set it to understand I want the rendered video to stay the same size as the original import file). I'm sure the problem is me and I'm also sure a fellow AMV creator with FCP and widescreen experience could solve the problem in one post but alas, I do not see that happening. For now I've put the experiementing aside since I need to finish getting the AWA CD together by September and I have the next couple of weekends planned.
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