Trying to capture from 4:3 Letterbox source

[demomanTNA]

I've been stuck in a rut for a bit with this problem. I've been trying to find a way to capture from a 4:3 Letterbox source so I can capture just the image without the black bars on the top and bottom being included with the capture so I can burn it to a DVD as a 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen disc.

Is there any suggestions on how I can accomplish this with Beyond TV? I like how nice the quality on the captures come out to be with BTV - especially with the noise filter that really does a good job.

Oh, and for the info I'm using the WinTV PVR250 card. Great card, not much more I can say.

I also included a screen cap so everyone can get an idea of what the source material I am working with looks like. Its from my Widescreen Laserdisc edition of Grumpy Old Men. Not the best screen cap I have ever done, but it gets the idea across of what I'm working with.

[btvbuddy]

I think the wall your hitting is that the PCI video encoder's you are using a NTSC frame based. Those cards will record that black part because it is part of the frame. Now, it may be possible to enable Beyond TV to ignore the black part but will likely require either a new PCI video encoder software driver from your manufacturer plus some custom code from SnapStream developers. This is not a 3.5 feature, maybe some day in 5.0 or 11.0 (just wishing a long success of upgrades) Maybe someone from SS can give a 'official' view on this...

[RobertH]

It isnt going to work because that card is only capable of capturing an NTSC 4x3 frame

You are going to have to capture it as a 4x3 image at say 720x480 and then use video editing software like tmpgenc to run through the video and crop the bars off the video.

[darkuni]

For those interested in pursuing this sort of thing, can the good Snapstream folks recommend us a reasonably priced card that WOULD handle that request?

[RobertH]

no because any card that your going to see is going to be stuck at a 4:3 frame unless it is a HD tuner and beyondtv doesnt support them.

Basically unless you write custom software to crop the video on the fly while capturing your not going to get what you want. Your going to have to capture the full 4:3 frame then crop it down to what you need.

[demomanTNA]

Okay, I just thought of an idea that might work.

I noticed as I was playing around with the settings as far as display that there is one settting for 16:9 stretched to 4:3. In essence the bars were missing and the image itself was vertically distored much like if, say, you set your DVD player to 16:9 and watch it on a 4:3 TV (and it doesn't have vertical compression).

Could it be possible either on 3.4 or 3.5 that one could record the video set to the 16:9 stretched to 4:3 and actually have it record at that? That would do in essence the same thing as cropping the bars out except its saving a step plus we all know what happens when you compress an already compress file (the quality goes down further).

Just an idea I thought up of....

[RobertH]

that is on the fly playback cropping wich is very easy to do because its something the video card / directx can do natively on the fly. Cropping while recording with a hardware encoder card is going to be next to impossible because they dont provide you with the raw video data.

Basically to put this to rest easily its not somthing your probably going to see in beyondtv. You may find it in other video capture programs, but for the most part this is going to require a 2 part procedure (capture at a 4:3 frame, crop the video after capture to 16:9a)

[Rich A]

You might be able to do it "after the fact". I know the latest Womble Mpeg Video Wizard (their high end editor) will allow you to crop any number of pixels from the top or bottom or both. You might want to try their software as it's available as a full function demo for 15 days (I think)

I would also guess this would take a LOT of time. In my case my PJ is a native 4:3 one. So my screen has remotely controlled movable top and bottom masks which gets rid of the 4:3 black bars that result when viewing a 16:9 video on a 4:3 device. The advantage of that is that the screen works at ANY aspect ratio simply by moving the masks. So when you look at the video all you see is the actual video with no bars. I can do 4:3, 16:9 and letter box (the ratio escapes me at the moment but it's something like 22:?) The PJ and custom screen solves all those problems for me. If you are viewing on a monitor/TV screen though, you will have to spend some time modifying the original capture.

When I get home tonight, I'll try running on of my Enterprise captures (16:9) through Womble with the crop option and see what happens.

I agree with the other guys. It's going to be VERY difficult to find any kind of capture card that will capture and crop at the same time. (if at all)

[btvbuddy]

Seems there are two ways to do this.

First, Post-processing. After you have a 4x3 capture you convert your 4x3 stream to 16x9 by cropping the black part. Keep in mind that you are taking a LOWREZ 4x3 throwing away part of it giving you a LOWER-REZ 16x9 - quality will not be very high. To get higher quality take your 4x3 stream crop it, then resize it to HD 1920 x 1080, then apply filters to achieve a line-doubled effect. Try deinterlace then median-2 pixels with smooth blur 2-pixels. Check that result on your large screen TV you will be very happy. You can try this using the free version of Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 (applying filters will require extra software/hardware). Regretfully, that may take 3 days to process without the special hardware.

Second, realtime 16x9 capture. You must first find a standard capture card that gives RAW access to the NTSC frame. I am not certain on the technique SnapStream is using to get a full frames for captures it might be custom or a third-part capture-toolkit. Develop a new capture program and driver that grabs that full frame crops it then saves it into a WMV file (just not sure AVI files support 16x9 frames) How fast you can do the crop and save it will determine the frame rate. If this can not be done Realtime then your WMV is going to have less frames-per-sec or will be jittery.

Technically both are possible but does it make any sense :-( How many users out there want this? How many people have the time available? How will a business that develops a realtime 16x9 solution recoup their development costs? Maybe some open-source developers that can work for free and have time and interest can do this, anyone?

Finally! Movie studios and content producers will be releasing new HD-DVD or blue-ray versions next year so if you want the highest quality content for your HD-set your wait won't be too long.

Good Luck!