So we’ve all seen "stretched " episodes of old TV shows, notably Seinfeld.
I know that there was a thread about this some time ago.
My question is this: Is there a simple way of converting old TV shows to 16:9?
I have tried numerous methods and they have all failed miserably.
On various cable stations the promos for old shows are stretched, but the shows themselves are not.
I haven’t tried this yet, but I was thinking that I could convert an old episode ( avi format ) into a VOB file then use something like Cusoft to resize it. Cusoft will rip and resize straight from a DVD but all my old shows have already been avi’ed.
Seems there must be an easier way.
This is purely an exercise in “Ah ha! So that’s how they did it!”.
There is no way to do it without distorting the picture. Either you stretch it from 4:3 to 16:9, or you cut the top/bottom off similar to cutting the sides off on widescreen conversions to 4:3.
You’d have to re-encode everything, which would take a while. I don’t understand why you’re not using a media player that’ll preserve the aspect ratio.
VirtualDub easily allows you to change the aspect ratio, and/or to crop pixels off the top and bottom of the picture.
Just open your avi in VirtualDub, then go to Video > Filters > Add and select the Resize filter from the list. It will give you a bunch of options for aspect ratio and cropping.
I think with Seinfeld, they went back to the original footage, which wasn’t widescreen, but captured a larger field of view than what was eventually broadcast as 4:3, then recropped as widescreen - inevitably losing some height, but gaining a bit of width that was originally cropped out.