Squeezing image to 16:9 in Compressor

Is it possible to take a letteboxed 4:3 image from FCP and squeeze/distort it in compressor to make it 16:9 enhanced? Hate using all that space on black bars when it could be going to image. The project I'm working on is framed at 2.40:1 so I realize I'll still have some letterboxing, but I have a widescreen TV and the TVC's blowup to fill my screen truly diminishes the quality of the image. Hoping that squeezing the image in FCP or Compressor and letting the TV unsqueeze it will yield a sharper image.

Hal

Hal The historic answer would have been "no". Because, as you surely know, resizing beyonds a source's native scale destroys resolution. And what you want to do means taking a partial section of the image and blowing it up.

But Compressor 2 takes advantage of very modern and sophisticated technology that converts this historic "no" into a "yes".... as long as you're prepared to wait for VERY long. This technology does its' magic very slowly

If you're willing to try, just three steps: 1) Select a MPEG-2 preset as if your source really was 16:9. 2) Go to the Frame controls tab, set it to custom and in the "Resize" menu, choose the highest quality option (leave everything else as is). 3) Go to the Crop tab and manually crop your source to a 16:9 area. That's it.
All the best



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

I'm gonna try this. Any idea what the crop dimensions are for 16:9?

Is the Frame Control Tab in Geometry in the Inspector? If so, my settings are grayed out. Is there somewhere else I should be looking. Thanks for humoring a newbie.

Hal

Okay, found the Frame Control tab, changed the settings and now need to know how to figure the cropping to make the image squeezed at the right ratio to unsqueeze properly. Assuming that means cropping the top and bottom. But by what percentage?

Thanks,

Hal

I can't help you with the percentages because when I needed to do this, the areas was clearly dictated by the 16:9 bars. I just cropped it manually to the 16:9 area. That won't work in your case. You can anyway try 5 second test, to see if you find the right crop percentage.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Success!! Figured that since the squeeze is usually 133 percent, that if you crop 67 from the top and 66 from the bottom it's perfect. NOW the question is: How do I get Compressor to do a better job compressing? I have the average bitrate set ti 7.3 and the max at 8.6. One would thnk that was high enough. But the image has quite a bit of bad pixilation in the background. This was on a 4 minute clip. My other settings are:
Name: test2
Description: Fits up to 90 minutes of video with Dolby Digital audio at 192 Kbps or 60 minutes with AIFF audio on a DVD-5
File Extension: m2v
Video Encoder
Format: M2V
Width: 720
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: NTSC CCIR 601/DV (16:9)
Crop: (L: 0, T: 66, R: 0, B: 67)
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls:
Retiming: High quality Motion Compensated
Resize Filter: Statistical Prediction
Deinterlace Filter: Motion Adaptive
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Same as Source
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Field dominance: Progressive scan
Average data rate: 7.3 (Mbps)
2 Pass VBR enabled
Maximum data rate: 8.6 (Mbps)
High quality
Best motion estimation
Closed GOP Size: 15, Structure: IBBP
DVD Studio Pro meta-data enabled

What should I be doing differently? Or is Compressor just not as good at compressing as some other software out there (BitVice?). Would love to stick with Compressor if I can get it to work better.

Suggestions?

Hal

Well, Hal. A letterboxed widescreen source blowed up to fill a 16:9 frame... anybody will expect that to look pixellated. Compressor has surprising technology to achieve that conversion, and I did get good results for that. But if it's not satisfactory for you, I woudn't blame the encoder.

While I believe that Compressor is currently as good or better than the other options you mention, they provide free demos, so you can try and figure out for yourself. Forget about removing the letterbox bars, though. They are just encoders.

In my opinion, the main cause for bad encodes nowadays is not the encoder, but the source, the user and the nature of MPEG-2 in general. Is your source DV/HDV, or has fast motion, handheld cameras, video noise, etc? All those things don't get along well with MPEG-2 encoding for DVD. Also, did you check the encode on a video screen? Because MPEG-2 as used on DVD looks much better on video screen than it does on computer screens.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com