The widescreen quality should be better than the full screen because the image is smaller. But how to make it? Before encoding or after encoding? What software to use?

-- Fieldside (fieldside@excite.com), January 12, 2001

Answers

It depends on your source material. Lots of DVD's and Laserdiscs are widescreen. Some camcorders have the option of recording in widescreen. VERY FEW VHS movies are in widescreen.

But making full screen video (pan and scan) into widescreen is something else. It wouldn't make sense to do this becase you are cutting the screen off at the top and bottom (alot of bootlegg movies take a fullscreen movie and apply black bars to the top and bottom of the screen for a psuedo-widescreen effect).

If what you are making is a VCD, a fullscreen movie doesn't yield any better quality. If you plan to do it anyway, i suggest you record to AVI format (try the huffyuv codec), apply the widescreen effect with say Adobe Premier (dont quote me on this program, I have never done it, but i think Premier has the capability), then encode.

-- Victor DeLarose (meso@mc.net), January 12, 2001.