Yeah, I've done letterbox since day one, nobody seems to care in the audiences. The only thing you can do that makes any sense is to stretch the footage vertically so it takes up all of the screen, but that will still look a bit odd to some people.
Unfortunately with the footage ripping and stuff... I cheat. Even if I bought the anime, which I own most of the ones I've used (the ones I don't have aren't out yet), I still torrent MKVs of it and use a media converter in every chance I can. Hence I feel guiltless about it since I bought them anyway. Sometimes it doesn't work though, so I have to rip them, which just always looks strange, I know I'm doing something wrong. But one thing that rocks about this: once I have the footage of one anime converted, I bought a cheap terabyte drive specifically for footage that has been converted to 720x480 avis of crisp quality for future use on parodies or music videos.
I'd really love if we could find some type of explanation on how the fansubbers do it. They've gotten ripping down to an art form.
EDIT:
EVERYONE!! Something you all may be VERY interested in. On a random check after mentioning it here, I did a search. The OJOsoft total media conversion package, including audio, video, DVD, etc. is on sale for 50 bucks this weekend until the end of tomorrow. It really is an incredible program. Download a trial and give it a shot, but grab it this weekend, it's totally worth it. It's simple, straight-forward, and has worked great for me for years. Even if it seems like a chunk of money, it's a one-time investment, it's worth it if you work with the footage a lot, which I know we all do.
http://www.ojosoft.com/purchase/buy-all ... olkit.htmlOn another note, have any of you spent any time cropping characters from footage and come up with an effective method of doing it cleanly? I was considering snapshotting each frame and photoshopping the images out and rendering as Targas with alpha, the alternative is a LOT of careful masking, which is exceptionally tedious as far as I can tell. Anyone have any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.