Help needed with Wide-Screen home video footage

[mark66]

Hi all,

Hoping someone can help me here. I have a Sony HC39E Digital Camcorder that is widescreen. I capture my raw .avi using Pinnacle Home Studio and it all looks great in 16:9 within Pinnacle. I can also play the raw .avi using Windows Media Player and it maintains the 16:9 ratio.

However, if I want to compress this footage, using something like Virtual Dub and any codec such as DivX, the video is output as 4:3 and is all out of proportion. I have looked through all the Virtual Dub settings and cannot see anything to tell it that the footage is widescreen.

If I use AVIcodec to interrogate the raw captured .avi it tells me that the video is 720x576 (4:3), but if I remember correctly all widescreen videos are actually 4:3, but some 'tag' within the file tells the media player to stretch it out to make it appear correct in 16:9.

Anyway, if someone could advise how I can maintain the 16:9 using Virtual Dub or recommend some other software that does do it I would be grateful.

Cheers

 

[mark66]

Hi mate,

Thanks for the tips and the input. However I did actually find a guide on how to maintain the 16:9 ratio using Virtual Dub later that night:

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd2divx_anamorphic.cfm

I just resized the film to 640x360 and that was that. I also picked up a few tips about De-interlacing and using the Null Transform filter, all of which gave me a great final result.

Thanks again for your time and input though