4x3 letterbox upped to 16x9 (DVD format)

seanh420

seanh420

Active member
this is my first try in upping 4x3 letterbox to 16x9 DVD. In vegas, I cropped off the bars at 720x360 which seems slightly more than the letterbox in the camera. Then a little magic bullet to make it nicer. Due to the amount of detail in the trees, optimal DVD bitrate could not be obtained even at the max of 9800kbit. The first two pictures are before and after. The last link is 9 meg zip containing VIDEO_TS folder of both 5 second clips, one as 4x3 and the other as 16x9 with a dumb menu to select either. I'm fairly confident these display properly on TV or widescreen TV.

(ignore that while line on the left, a glitch on my framegrab)
schoolhouse1.jpg


after:
schoolhouse3.jpg



dvd sample (slow to download 9meg)
http://64.1.139.78/dvxuser/16x9upres.zip
 
Wow!
That looks stunning!

Is the first shot straight from the camera, or does it have the CC already?

You should uprez a frame that hasn't been touched (assuming that first grab hasn't) just to show the differences solely from the uprez.

Not everyone has Magic Bullet :(.
 
I'm a little confused by what you mean 4:3 to 16:9. Just adding the black bars? You can stretch out an image to make it fit a true wider aspect, but you're going to get pretty grainy. The pixel ratio will be out of whack too, and that makes for blurry images a lot of times.
 
technically i guess its not uprezzed at all. its more like cropped. the first clip is the original footage as it looks on the tape with 4x3 letterbox in camera. the second clip is a screenshot taken from the rendered dvd footage via flaskmpeg. If you downloaded my zip, and open it in powerdvd or another software, you'll notice that the first clip is 4:3 mpeg2, but the second clip is 16:9 LB and will stretch the player. all the 16:9 thing is, is the original 4:3 clip cropped to 720x360, then stretched to fill a 720x480 frame (vertically stretched, no horizontal stretch). then in the mpeg encoder, I have the flag set at 16:9, so it stretches it to fit right on widescreen tv or LB on a shitass 4:3 tv.

Id really like for barry green or disjecta to comment on this
 
I don't see any quality issues with this uprezzing. Looks good. Maybe a test on slower-moving or still material would be in order. Makes me want to shoot 16:9.
 
this is roughly what I did. (John Hudson wants to know)

I also will add that this is totally my way, not some recommended way by Sony
the footage in the schoolhouse as show was F6 24p adv.

1) in Vegas 5.0d, do a file>new project

2) select NTSC DV 24p (720x480, 23.976 fps) ...NOT the widescreen one

3) capture 4x3 footage to the timeline

4) right click the clip on the timeline, select Video Event Pan/Crop

In the event Pan/Crop dialog------

5) Deselect the Lock Aspect Ratio button. (all the way on left hand side, third one up from the bottom)

6) Under source,change Maintain Aspect Ratio: NO (default is YES)

7) Under position, change Height: 360 (default is 480, assuming Width: 720)

Close event Pan/Scan dialog------

8) Goto File> Render As...

9) Set the Save as Type to Video for windows (*.avi)

10) Set Template to Default Template (uncompressed)

(Also render the audio track separately as AC3 or PCM WAV)

Before saving, note that uncompressed avi at 720x480 eats up a good 2GB per minute, and wont play back nicely unless you have a fast SATA drive or similar. The goal here is to optimize quality at the expense of simplicity. The result here should be an uncompressed avi at 720x480, where the 720x360 cropped clip has been stretched vertically about the center to fill the entire 720x480 frame. The next thing that needs to be done is mpeg2 encoding for DVD followed by the DVD Authoring.

In both steps it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, that the 16x9 flag is specified both in the mpeg encode and the authoring, otherwise the clip will look vertically stretched on the TV (shitty). For this I used Cinema Craft Encoder 2.67.00.08, the very best there is (mainconcept people use mainconcept, etc.). Then for authoring I used Spruce DVDMaestro v2.9 2915a the ancestor to todays Apple DVD Studio Pro (others will work also)

1) Open CCE or CCE Trial

2) Right click in the white area and select Add

3) select the uncompressed avi created from vegas, it will now appear in the listbox.

4) right click on the item we just added to the list box, select Edit

Inside Encode Settings Dialog -------

5) Timecode settings; set to 00 00 00 00 (default is 01 00 00 00)

6) Uncheck Audio File

7) *IMPORTANT* Under Aspect Ratio Dropdown, change to 16:9

8) change mode to MPEG-2 (ES, One-Pass VBR)

9) under Quantization factor and bitrate, set Q:60 Min:0 Max: 9000

I'm leaving max at 9000 instead of 9800 so that there is room to add the AC3 later without going over the maximum bitrate allowed by the DVD Standard

10) click the Video Button and set these settings

Inside Video Settings Dialog------

-GOP Sequence should be M=3, N/M=4
-check Add Sequence End Code
-check DVD Video Compliant
-Luminance level should be 16 to 235
-framerate should be 23.976 (this is because of the vegas setting 24p)

End Video Settings Dialog------

11) click the Quality Button and set these settings

Inside Quality Dialog------

-Uncheck Low Pass Filter, Effective restricted vertical filter, and dithered quantization. ( there should be no simple settings select either)
-drag quantizer characteristics slider over to 30
-Intra Block DC Precision = 10
-**Block Scanning order = zigzag**
-**check Progressive Frame Flag**

End Quality Dialog------

12) Click OK to save the Encode settings, then click encode to do a first pass encode

13) after first pass finishes, right click the avi in the listbox and do edit to bring up the Encode Settings dialog like before.

14) change mode to MPEG2 (ES, Multipass VBR)

15) Under bitrate, try something like Avg: 6000, Min: 0, Max: 9000

16) Under multipass VBR settings the default is 3. change it to 9 for max quality (this will also take a long time to encode!)

17) click bit allocation to open Advanced VBR Settings. In there set the Bias to 0. You can also tweak the bitrate, but i wont explain all that right now.

18) close, OK, Encode. wait a long time.

the end result is a high quality MPEG2 .mpv file at 23.976 fps. the next step is to convert this file to NTSC 29.976 fps via pulldown. I'm still looking for the best pulldown app out there, but for now I been using pulldown.exe from doom9.org or dgpulldown 1.0 (some new thing I found). pulldown.exe is command line so you have to open a command window. My file created from vegas was called Untitled.avi, then from CCE I got Untitled.mpv

1) click start, run, type cmd, hit enter

2) to run pulldown on your mpv file use the command like this:
C:\>pulldown.exe untitled.mpv output-pd.m2v -progframes p -drop_frame true

3) the next step is to import Untitled.ac3 and output-pd.m2v into an authoring program to multiplex them into a VOB. (dts freaks use surcode dts pro)

----------
dvd maestro time

1) open dvd maestro (i know, i know, this is a legacy app, but bear with me)

2) right click in the lower right hand corner and select Import media asset. select both the output-pd.m2v and Untitled.ac3

3) double click Movie1 to open the movie 1 dialog. drag the output-pd.m2v to the video timeline, then the Untitled.ac3 to the audio timeline below it.

3b) also in the movie window, right click the 4:3 and change to 16:9 LB/PS

4) go to the view menu> connections, then click on Untitled1 project

5) in connections pane, set First Play to Movie1 00:00:00;00

6) Tools > Compile, select a folder

and after that I got VOBs which is in that sample file with the trees in this post.
if people are interested Ill try to write a better explaination later. If you find flaws or bugs, tell me!
 
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