Crop/Borders/Resize Help Needed PLEASE

640x480 on a PC normally means an display aspect ratios (DAR) of 4:3. You want to preserve that. For SVCD, 480x480 (or 480x576 for PAL) will give you a DAR of 4:3. If you find that confusing, it just means that the player scales the 480x480 image to 4:3 aspect on playback. For VCD, 352x240 (or 352x288 for PAL, IIRC) is the 4:3 resolution. That gives you resize without taking into account adding borders for overscan. Now, adding borders for overscan is a little more challenging. Every TV potentially has a different amount of overscan. Many newer HDTVs (LCD and plasma being perfect examples) have no overscan. So there is no one set of borders that will work perfectly for all Televisions. That said, I'd recommend adding borders on macroblock boundaries to maximize encoder effeciency. That means adding 16 or 32 pixel borders all the way around the picture (after resize). And of course that means resizing smaller so that the end resolution *after* adding borders ends up being 480x480 or 352x240. For example, if you want to add 32 pixel borders to an SVCD, you need to resize to 416x416, then add the borders. On VCD, adding 16 pixel borders will probably result in visible borders all the way around when watching on TV. What I mean is 16 pixel borders will fill the overscan and then some. On SVCD, 16 pixel borders will not be visible on many TVs (their overscan is greater than 16 pixels), but on some TVs they will be visible. 32 pixel borders will be visible on most TVs. There are a variety of ways to add borders to an image. I strongly recommend using AddBorders in an AviSynth script.

Thanks for the assist and explanation. :) I'm now in the process of locating some manner of guide for AVISynth that describes this process. My encoding attempts thus far have been done solely with TMPGEnc Plus, VCD Easy and VirtualDub for my audio... I've not yet used AVISynth for anything... Assuming I don't find one first, could you perhaps point me to a guide that would help me with this process, or at least the AVISynth portion of it?

Again guys, thanks for the tips. :) The AVISynth/FitCD settings seem to be doing the job video wise... But as always, if I fix one thing, two more pop up... :

Okay....fumbling through it. lol Figured out where to adjust the framerate...re-encoding my video stream with TMPG now. Then I guess I've just got to mux it with the audio and hope it works....

you can only create SVCDs at either standard PAL (25 fps) or standard NTSC (23.97/29.97 fps) because they have to be compatible with standalone players. those would most likely not be able to play a SVCD with a different framerate correctly. so when aiming for an SVCD (or of course VCD) you'll have to accept that there are quite a lot of frames added to the video which, although you don't seem to be troubled by it, isn't too good in general, as you'll of course loose a lot of bitrate on duplicated frames and will also get some less smooth playback. anyway, as i said above there's not much you can do about it if you need it to be on SVCD! steVe

Too bad you can't just apply RFF/TFF to double the playback framerate (like pulldown, but 2:1 rather then 5:4). That would really use bitrate efficiently, though I don't know if such a thing would be SVCD compliant. Incidentally, I don't believe 23.976 is a valid VCD framerate. I don't believe pulldown is valid on VCD, so NTSC VCD *has* to be encoded at 29.97 fps. In any case, it's probably easier and smoother to duplicate each frame, increasing the framerate to 30 fps, then use AssumeFPS to force it to 29.97. Not sure if you'd need to adjust the audio - depends how long your clips are. You could do some complicated manipulation to increase it to 24 fps, use AssumeFPS to force it to 23.976, then apply pulldown after encoding, but the inconsistent frame duplication combined with pulldown would probably result in slightly stuttery playback (perhaps barely noticable, but there none-the-less). @manono Interesting that your DLP has overscan. I suppose, since it's projection/reflection based, they have to use an optical screen to prevent stray light leakage around the edges of the picture. I'm fairly sure the underlying light processor chip has no overscan (unless it's some non-standard resolution like 996x742 - I'm not sure how they make those things). I wonder if LCD based projectors (projection/transmission based) have overscan. I suppose they probably do. They probably have the same problem with light leaking around the edges of the LCD.