SD to HD, black sidebars, or no bars?
 

Hello All, It has been a while. Again, thanks to LS for selling me outstanding equipment to capture SD VHS and Hi8 video and now I'm onto converting my captures. My question is this: Is it necessary to add the 240 pixels on each side of my video taking it from 1440x1080 to 1920x480. Will I run into problems with the HD video not being 1920x480? Also, does it matter if I add borders wide enough to meet the 16x9 AR while masking, or does it need to be done in 2 steps. Here's my 2 different avisynth scripts that accomplish the same thing even if the second does encode slower:

The seemingly slower method:

Any thoughts by the Pros lurking out there?

Bmac

I'm not a pro but 1440x1080 should be fine, and pillarboxing to 1920x1080 would prevent a display that isn't 16x9 such as my 16:10 monitor would have to add black bars on the top and bottom when I play the video in fullscreen mode.

Do not encode side bars.

I haven't come across any player (hardware or software) or TV that needs burned-in black side bars to display SD content correctly. In the unlikely event you come across a player/TV that stretches SD out to widescreen, it should have a control that will allow you to force the video display to 4:3.

If you do burn in side bars, the actual video will be much reduced in size when played on a phone or ipad (or any other 4:3 type screen).

I did burn in side bars on my SD videos years ago and have regretted it ever since, and I am now going through re-encoding to remove them.

Not having 16x9 1:1 aspect can result in problems, but based on factors.
- Youtube? Probably not.
- Other devices/sites/scripts to give you grief? Yes, some will.

I've done both.

@Hushpower,

A true sign a serious hobbyist is we're never pleased, redoing again and again. Not just video, but even something like action figures, where something as silly as a minor repaint causes rabid fans to buy it. (Yes, yes, guilty a few times myself! :laugh:)

That's why (for example) I encourage people to get proper gear, to do it once, best possible, and never again. Learn from my experience, or even mistakes. Hobbyists redo it -- casual users just grumble about it, redirecting their ire at the process, or blame the format ("only VHS"), or make excuses ("whatever, good enough"), rather than place blame on their own bad gear decisions.

In this case, bad encoding decisions. We all have them.

So LS, 1440 or 1920? Bars or no bars? I HAVE to know what you think.

I really have no preference. I don't like adding bars, but then I don't like having my video stretched due to bad players. Can't win. Encode based on needs.

- If for personal use only, do whatever.
- If for distribution, err on side of caution (add bars).

Instead of hypothesising about what-ifs, what player or device will stretch a 4:3 video? How long does this theoretical what-if have to go on for? Years?

Not "probably", never. You can throw any reasonably-normal frame size you like at YT and it will faithfully reproduce it.

Smart TVs, for example, can be a problem. 1440 will be rejected as an invalid resolution, and anything HD must be 16x9 square pixels.

I've come across videos where this was not true. PEBKAC is surely to blame, wrong/weird encoding settings, misflagging, etc. Newbie making mistakes, twiddling settings in encoder, or wrongly picking a template. This nothing new, you'd see the same thing with VCDs, DVD, etc.

Video encoding can be a mess, it's not binary. There are specs, but too often ignored.

Mountains out of outlier molehills.

The Youtube situation, yes, tiny % problem, rounding error.
The smart TV, no, way too common.

@BmacSWA, I suggest you do a test run. Encode a short MP4, give it to all the likely recipients of your videos and get them to play it. I will be very surprised if you find ANY device that automatically stretches your 4:3s.

For TVs of course, you can use the aspect control to play them properly if you find one that doesn't do it automatically.

On the topic of players, another reason is if you'd want to view your content on an old 4:3 CRT. If the 4:3 video is encoded as 16:9 with black bars on the sides (So 4:3 content in a 16:9 frame), than the overall image would appear like it is not using up all the space of the 4:3 TV.

An example being showcased in this Reddit thread

Hush I’m going to do exactly that. The bars aren’t hard to add and adds nothing to file size. I’ll see how it goes. And Aya I doubt anyone will ever watch anything I have on a CRT ever again. This is a good discussion though and I’ll add my findings when they roll in.

I have an old CRT "just in case". I probably used it 20 times from 2012 to 2021 (so about twice per year, on average, for 9 years), and it's not even been plugged in for these past 3+ years. Only semi-sane video packrats keep these heavy boxes, not normal people. It's a fraction of 1% of the population. That's the VHS/tape hobbyist in me that can't let go. So odd of "in case you want to watch it on CRT" is literally 0.x%, a rounding error.

I replaced that "big" 36" CRT with a huge 75" 4K display. The best part? That 75" in '21 cost less than the 36" did in '06. There is zero chance I'll watch that CRT now. Oh, and I bought both as "open box" units, so I got crazy deals on both.

I'm just keeping it real, cold dose of reality. :noworry:

The problem with 4:3 1440x1080 is that some media players and video editors, like iMovie, will assume that anything in that resolution is anamorphic 16:9, and stretch it out to widescreen.

That's why I upscale 4:3 480i to 960x720, because it doesn't have that problem, and since it's 1.5x the resolution, the upscaling is higher-quality. And it's good enough to get you 50 or 60 fps playback on YouTube.

For God’s sake don’t mention upscaling 480 to 960 by 720 again. This won’t end well…

...and by that last post I was jovially stating we beat to death the topic od upscaling to that resolution in another post. Prepare to be brow beat if the right people see it.

On another note, I haven't ran into a problem with a player playing the "square" 1440x1080 yet, but my tests so far have been limited.

But... I have since ran into another question while figuring out the original question. IF I'm using Final Cut Pro (I suppose this question would apply if one was using any NLE outside of virtualDub) to adjust color and export a final video "Master", do I even need to mask the video and convert Rec.601 to Rec.709? I can mask and center in FCPX easily and output to 1920x1080, and I'm adjusting the color anyway with a final Rec.709 output. Seems like I'm taking extra steps I don't need. I truly just wanted to import deinterlaced video into FCPX in the first place.

What do you guys think?

Bmac

A conclusion... for now anyway. I've encoded clips of DV Hi8 and VHS in a few resolutions, and used or didn't use colormatrix is AVS. Here's what worked for me, mileage may vary.

All the SD video was run through QTGMC, noise cropped then borders added for masking. Then I resized the video two ways with Spline64Resize (I found the look it gave me the most pleasant comparing to other resizers I tried) from 720x480 to both 1440x1080 and 1920x1080 with larger right and left size black bars to create a standard 16x9 ratio. I decided to drop colormatrix (at least used a comment hash) as 99% of the time I am color correcting in Final Cut Pro X which will to the Rec.709 tagging on the final output.

What I found was this (no CRT testing, sorry it's 2024 and like I said, I'll never use it). Every single player and device I and the people around me used ran the 1440x1080 just fine. no stretching, no cropping. The only I issues I did see when dropping into editors was that FCPX would bring to my attention it was a non standard size and ask what I wanted to do, and iMovie did in fact crop the square HD video to fit a 16x9 aspect ratio. In either case it was an easy fix. In FCPX I simply selected standard 1080p or Custom size. It had no problem either way. iMovie took a couple more keystrokes with the crop tool and I could spit out either square or 16x9 as well.

The driving factor for me was my aging PC where I use VirtualDub and AvsPmod. Generating the 1920x1080 video took about 15-20% longer to encode. So 40 hours of video took time out of my life waiting for encoding. Not a huge deal since I just let it run and come back to it later, but saving myself time and computing cycles I opted for 1440x1080 and let the NLE in post spit out the same black bars on the sides.

I hope this info is found useful

Bmac