I shot some regular video and downloaded it to my computer. I would like to change the format-look so it resembles a Letterbox movie - so it would look like a wide-screen film when played. How do I create a 'widescreen' type video image that has a different aspect ratio than the source files? Also - I need to be able to adjust & move the placement of the 'Letterbox format'.... Because every shot in the original video is framed differently - I cannot use a 'crop' that 'always frames the middle of the image' - in the Same place all the time. Every shot in the video is composed differently and I will have to crop sometimes to the upper part of the frame and other times to the middle or lower parts. So whatever cropping software I use - it has to be adjustable. Thanks for all your help - you're the smartest people on the web here!
I'm not exactly sure what you are after, but I did something similar when I was playing with my still camera a couple of years ago. I took a few seconds of movie that was 320x240 4:3 aspect ratio and saved as an avi. Loaded it into VirtualDub and used a filter called 'Canvas Size' to make a new 'canvas' of 640x352 ~16:9 Moved the video image to where I wanted on the canvas and saved a range of frames with a lossless codec. I moved the image again and saved the next range, etc. Then I appended all the saved segments and selected the DivX codec for the final output. The quality on this is low, but the source was low quality and I only did it as a test. http://tinypic.com/r/1zd7plz/4]View My Video Different, smaller clip; better quality. http://tinypic.com/r/wk358n/4]View
Thanks, Attar. Works perfectly - just what I was looking for. That VirtualDub is incredible when it comes to reformating video.