Re: Cropping .dv files

Okay, let's start again from the top, in detail.

The clip was originally made in widescreen, and when viewed at 16:9 is not
distorted.

For reasons beyond my control, it was presented to me on a VHS video, which
displays on television in 4:3 and with the image squeezed tall and thin.

I have loaded this onto my computer using my camcorder as an analogue-digital
converter. It now sits on my Mac as a .dv file. When played using Quicktime
Pro it appears by default in 720x576 pixels and looks *very* squeezed. But by
holding down the shift key I can get it to display in any aspect ratio I
like. Displayed at 720x405 (ie 16:9) it looks fine.

I want to incorporate it onto a DVD, which I plan to author using iDVD. This
DVD will be played on regular DVD players. Most of the movie clips on the DVD
will be standard PAL 4:3 clips, but this one isn't.

There isn't anything important at the edges of the clip, so 'pan-and-scan'
(if that's what trimming off the edges is called) is just as good (if not
better) than letterboxing. That's why the only success I've had so far is by
using OpenShiiva to crop 72 pixels from both the left and right of the clip
and stretching the remaining pixels (making them wider) to pull the clip back
to 720x576. I can then view the clip (using Quicktime Pro) at 4:3 ratio, and
there is no distortion. The only problem is that OpenShiiva also compresses
the clip severely, and loses quality unacceptably.

Other things I've tried:

Importing into iMovie set to DV-PAL (widescreen) keeps the old 4:3 aspect
ratio but puts black bars down the outside of the picture to pad it out to
16:9 (kind of anti-letterboxing).

Using ffmpegx should work but doesn't. When I set it to crop the clip, it all
runs smoothly, the preview looks just how I want it to, but the finished
product isn't clipped.

There. Hope that's made the position clear. Over to you guys.

MST


.

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