Output Resolutions ?? everything, something, encode, images

andy

I generally encode 2 CD DivX (Film or NTSC), so my output resolutions that I use start with 704 (generally).  However, does it sound right when the resolutions are 704x288 or 704x304?  It just doesn't sound right.

Upon playback, the images are quite narrow.  I know that I can tweak the playback with ZoomPlayer, BSPlayer, or DivXG400.  But, am I doing something wrong while encoding?  Earlier, my movies seemed fine, but lately everything seems to be those verrrry narrow sizes.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Hi-

704x288 is a little narrow. Perhaps you're using Smart Crop All after trimming the black bars. 704x304 is OK. I would recommend using Smart Crop Left-Right to keep them from becoming any skinnier than they already are. The important thing is that Aspect Error is down near zero. Not much you can do about those 2.35:1 movies. They'll always look skinny unless you buy yourself a big 61quot; widescreen TV to watch them on.

There is an alternative that I don't necessarily recommend. Start hacking away at the left and right sides of the picture, and then do a Smart Crop Left-Right. You might find that 2.125:1 or so looks better to you. But you didn't hear that from me, or I'll lose what little credibility I still have.

Just mt 2ec but I'm kinda fond of 1:2.35 being cropped to 672x304 it looks very well on a (non std) 1280x600 display. 95%+ of the time it works well - occassionally [6th Sense comes to mind] you can get caught with a scene that really uses the full frame width. A plus is that the video quality (for given file size) is slightly better if you go for 672x304 rather than 704x304.

It helps if you watch dvd first or flick thru the movie using dvd2avi/flask to see if there are any w-i-d-e scenes.

Ok, we've established that I'm not crazy afterall (it is a bit narrow).

The thing is that I watch all of my movies using my TV-Out (Matrox G550), so I wanna kinda utilize my 36quot; TV a little more.  I'd hate to stretch the movie to have it less narrow, so that's why I thought maybe it was an encoding issue....like I'm not using a setting like I used to.  I've also tried to manually crop to make sure that I'm not cropping out any of the video and messing the aspect ratio.  Hmm...  ??

Hi-

Since you always watch on TV, make sure that quot;Follow the ITU-R BT.601 Standardquot; is checked in the Options tab of GKnot.

Scotto - seeing as we're talking about gknot here you don't have to worry much about the aspect ratio [AR] gknot tells you what it's doing - try it out using 1st the autocrop button then select 24/24 as the left/right crops the AR will change from ~2.35 to ~2.2. I think current advice is to keep the AR error under 3%, I usually aim for 0-0.5% error and tick 601 to suit. YOu could select smart crop [I dont] which will take care of AR but may involve cropping to some odd width rather than 672, I image the whole point of targeting 672*Y is to avoid resizing on the horizontal.

Mamanos' point about 601 is spot on though I must confess I choose 601 on/off to suit the frame size rather than the display device. Click the 601 box under options and you'll see the X*Y of the cropped/resized frame change.