DVDFab and Handbrake cropping issues.

Why the heck would you crop the black bars and change the original aspect ratio?
That is not the way it is meant to be seen.

If you do insist on watching it with a skewed aspect ratio, then simply zoom in on your display device.

Or if you have a projector then build yourself an Anamorphic Lens - the only way to get rid of black bars whilst keeping the original AR.

These are my usual settings for transcoding a movie, keeping the original aspect ratio. The crop settings on the lower right have automatically set to crop the borders of the TV broadcast. Normally I leave it alone.


If you want to crop it further, click Custom and reset the left and right controls. You'll have to determine how many pixels to crop on each side. To do that I take a screen shot of a frame from the vid, and open it in paint.net. Using the pixel grid I can count how many pixels to crop and set Hb accordingly.

It has nothing to do with the mastering and everything to do with the shooting; the director's vision for the movie.
Unfortunately, there is no one single standard for shooting films; some directors use 1.78/1.87, others use 2.35:1 and some even use 2.40:1.
Philips introduced a 2.35:1 AR TV last year. With that, you wouldn't get black bars on 2.35:1 material but you would with 16:9 material.
No matter what you do, you will never be rid of the black bars.
Unless as you wish to do, crop each and every movie; which IMO is pointless. Cropping is simply throwing away relevant content.
If you have a projector, look into an 'Anamorphic Lens'. Gets rid of black bars without any source modification. Great way to watch movies.

I'm sure L33TX43RT understands all that, he just doesn't like the black bars. I disagree, I prefer the original AR and I've gotten used to the bars. But each to their own.

So seeing the entire movie as filmed by the cinematographer and director bugs you because there's black bars on your HDTV?

Ah....Sammy, lay off him.
To each his own....even if it is sacrilege to us.

Why is every single thread I find on cropping to 16:9 immediately answered with "omg why would you want to do that?"

Very simple:

1) could care less how it was "meant" to be seen, I got my own will.
2) My portable screen is too small to waste space on black borders and most of the movie's action happens close enough to the center of the image, that the tradeoff is easily worth it.
3) While some Video players or Televisions do a perfectly good job of 'zoom + crop' to fit without distortion, a lot of them don't.
4) It reduces the overall image size to that part which you actually need, allowing better quality at lower file sizes for portable use.
5) We're not talking about cropping your master file of the video! This is a purpose bound encode for use with specific displays.


So, I hope that "why oh why" question is sufficiently answered.


But this only detracts from the real question: Why is Windows Media Player Classic perfectly capable of properly zooming and cropping video to fill the screen without distortion, and Video encoders are incapable to do that without a LOT of fumbling?
On Media Player Classic, I just hit one menu option, 2 clicks! that's it - perfect every time. No black bars, no distortion. What is the magic that Handbreak and everybody else, including Xmedia, Freemaker etc can't duplicate?


Is it only cause they have the same attitude of "oh why would you ever want to do that?"

Did they not think that people will create different files for different devices as needed?


As for watching a movie in 2.4:1 or such, unless I spend a LOT of cash on an overpriced, comparatively small, specialized TV from Philips or some other rare bird TV, I'm stuck with 16:9 like everybody else. You can call 16:9 arbitrary and contrived all you want, but that's the display ratio we got on Televisions, Computers and mobile devices (excluding a few Crapple devices). That pretty much makes it the standard, and any other ratio is just as contrived, even if they created them over the years to account for various technical issues for shooting and distributing films.

So, given that 16:9 is the de-facto standard for 98% of all displays consumers have access to purchase in 2012, shouldn't that warrant a one-click zoom+crop setting that actually works? Programmatically, it can't be that hard: zoom to fill the screen vertically, then cut off left and right excess.


EDIT: include warning that you shouldn't do this to your master file, as you eliminate part of the picture. Done, thanks much.
Edited by N13L5 - 10/18/12 at 9:39am

Still no answers to these questions? Just extremely unhelpful, "why would you want to do this" responses?

I'm in the same boat as the OP. The zoom feature on my TV crops out even more than necessary and is poor.

I'm ripping my blurays to my HTPC for ease of use right now, and I'd love to be able to fill the screen rather than suffer widescreen.

And yes, that is SUFFER widescreen, I hated it with VHS, I hated it with DVD and I hate it with Blu Ray. I don't care about the directors artistic vision and I do not own my own cinema, projector or anamorphic lense. Give me OAR in the cinema, fine, give me 16:9 at home. I don't have very good vision and even with a 50" TV sitting 6 feet away I find widescreen far too small.

Why is there no solution for this yet? Or at least one I can find, I've been messing around Handbrake for weeks now, can't get it to do this.

If anyone has a HELPFUL response about how to encode video so it is 16:9 in handbrake I'd love to hear it.

Why would you want to do that?!

All kidding aside. Open Handbrake> Picture> Cropping> Click on Custom.
From there you can crop the top, bottom and sides.

Thankyou!! so it is the cropping that I need to change. I was fiddling with this all day yesterday, problem is that it takes a couple of hours to encode something each time I try a different settig so it takes a while to see if something works or not.

What is baffling me about handbrake is file size. I have one movie at 3gb and another at 16gbs, both using same settings, similar length of movie.... Surprisingly the 3GB movie looks really good too.

I'll eventually figure this out, lol.

Thanks for the help!

you don't need to encode that long. what you can do is you start the encode, wait until you have enough frames. maybe let the encoding process go for 10-15 minutes. then make a copy of the file that's being generated. this allows handbrake to keep encoding and making the full file while you view the copied file. with the copy of the file, you should have enough video to get a sense of what the final product will be.

the funny thing about these posts is that when people were cropping movies to fit the full 4:3 screen (during that time when 4:3 TVs were so common) and everyone blasted them for the blasphemy. I think I made a number of movie encodes, both 4:3 and 16:9 so that I would have a full-frame movie. it sucked watching big black bars with a tiny strip of movie on a 20" 4:3 TV.