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When not to use Anamorphic?

roland.g

roland.g

macrumors 604
Original poster
Apr 11, 2005
7,498
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I have been ripping my DVDs using HB 0.9.2.

For some movies (newer, action) it is very obvious to use anamorphic. They usually say anamorphic widescreen on the box and/or 2.35:1. Movies like LOTR, Batman Begins, Revenge of the Sith, even Sneakers etc.

For some movies that are fairly new and in widescreen like Snatch and others, it says Widescreen 1.85:1. Not sure whether to use anamorphic or none.

And for older movies, like Better of Dead, Days of Thunder, movies from the 80s and early 90s, it is not as clear. What to use.

What guidelines do you use for Anamorphic vs. None in your HB rips. Does it make a difference to the Apple TV? I noticed that if I ripped Better of Dead at Anamorphic and open it in QT on my iMac I get 720x480 in the inspector, but it shows 853x480 in parentheses, wasn't sure what the Apple TV and my TV would then do with that?
 
I am having same problems, i constantly get the black bars above and below movie, cant get rid of them, but i dont know what selection to chose, i am using ATV preset in Handbrake 0.9.2 got any suggestions ? These are being out put to my 42" LCD
 
iprice606 said:
I am having same problems, i constantly get the black bars above and below movie, cant get rid of them, but i dont know what selection to chose, i am using ATV preset in Handbrake 0.9.2 got any suggestions ? These are being out put to my 42" LCD
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You should expect "black bars" top and bottom when the original film had a wider aspect ratio than your TV. The only alternatives are zooming in and cropping the left and right (which remove important bits of the scene) or stretching the picture vertically, giving you tall thin people. In this case, the black bars are deliberate!

Update: read this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)
In fact, just follow your other thread instead of taking this one off topic.

As to this thread - I believe Apple TV take 2 does cope with anamorphic content from HB properly.
 
I use anamorphic setting always. I find that HB autocrops very well so if the original was letterboxed, it removes the black bars and anamorphs it.
 
Yeah, but what about some 80s movie like The North Shore or Weird Science. Should the output really by 853x or 720x?
 
I always rip in Anamorphic. That way I know I'm getting the correct theatrical aspect ratio, or the ratio that the film is intended to be viewed in.
 
cohibadad said:
I use anamorphic setting always. I find that HB autocrops very well so if the original was letterboxed, it removes the black bars and anamorphs it.
Click to expand...

I guess I am a little confused. Don't movies from early DVD production when there weren't widescreen tvs just have a 720width and isn't using strict/loose vs. none on the anamorph settings widen the image more than it should be in the rip?
 
This setting is something that has confused me for a long time. Whenever I choose Anamorphic setting in 0.9.2 no matter if the movie was intended for anamorphic or not, i get vertical banding like its stretching the movie more then it needs to be. when i was using 0.9.1 i had no problem, i used the setting for those dvd that said it was anamorphic and everything looked great. But i am still using 0.9.2, i just do not select anamorphic anymore because obviously something is wrong with the setting. The main i still use this version is because encoding is faster and i can put multiple movies in the queue without crashing handbrake.

If anyone can shed more light on why this anamorphic PAR setting is not working, please let me know.
 
roland.g said:
I guess I am a little confused. Don't movies from early DVD production when there weren't widescreen tvs just have a 720width and isn't using strict/loose vs. none on the anamorph settings widen the image more than it should be in the rip?
Click to expand...

I may be incorrect, but my understanding of the HB anamorph setting doesn't have anything to do with whether the original is anamorphic. It only deals with what HB is producing. The setting only determines if you want HB to produce anamorphic output to display differently on multiple screen sizes. I use anamorphic for all my encodes and haven't noticed any stretching or shrinking. I recompile with HB builds and I have noticed recently that HB has had some weird screen sizing/shrinking issues on preview which resolved when I clicked out of a preset and back. So this may have produced some very odd outputs, but anamorphic itself has not when properly implemented by HB. Now, I only display on 16:9 screens so I can't really say how my encodes would look on 4:3.
 
I suggest only using anamorphic (particularly strict) on dvd's that are anamorphic to begin with. For example, in the mid 80's some dvd's were done hard letterboxed, Con-Air comes to mind. This looks better with anamorphic turned off in HB as the dvd is not anamorphic. Anamorphic in HB does not create something out of nothing.
 
dynaflash said:
I suggest only using anamorphic (particularly strict) on dvd's that are anamorphic to begin with. For example, in the mid 80's some dvd's were done hard letterboxed, Con-Air comes to mind. This looks better with anamorphic turned off in HB as the dvd is not anamorphic. Anamorphic in HB does not create something out of nothing.
Click to expand...

This is the same philosophy that I use; if it is anamorphically stored on the DVD, I use anamorphic (typically loose). For all of my 4x3 TV encodes, I turn anamorphic off.
 
I did Days of Thunder last night in a test, and with anamorphic it came out at 672x272 and with none it came out at 720x304. Opening it in quicktime and stretching the 672x out made it the same 720x304, but when I streamed the two tests on the Apple TV, the non-anamorphic 720 looked better. Now this is one of the few cases where I have seen the output lower than 720 and not something in the 853 range. But I haven't rechecked some of the other 80s movies I have done like Wierd Science, Better Off Dead, etc.
 
roland.g said:
I did Days of Thunder last night in a test, and with anamorphic it came out at 672x272 and with none it came out at 720x304. Opening it in quicktime and stretching the 672x out made it the same 720x304, but when I streamed the two tests on the Apple TV, the non-anamorphic 720 looked better. Now this is one of the few cases where I have seen the output lower than 720 and not something in the 853 range. But I haven't rechecked some of the other 80s movies I have done like Wierd Science, Better Off Dead, etc.
Click to expand...
The old Days of Thunder disc was encoded non-anamoprhically on the DVD. It is basically a 4x3 frame with the black bars imposed on it. I would encode this in Handbrake with anamorphic turned off.
 
ah. good info. so only use anamorphic if original is anamorphic. I've done many non-anamorphics with anamorphic on and haven't noticed any degradation. Maybe I will notice an improvement with it off. I did bmwfilms The Hire last night and it looked great (The Hire is kind of a HB nightmare as is Pixar Animated Shorts. HB doesn't recognize most if any of the video tracks). The problem I've been having with HB lately has been audio. The Hire audio gets out of sync at certain points up to about 10 seconds off. The same happened with Independence Day. The Empire Strikes Back AC3 is completely garbled and sounds like R2D2 dubbed the entire movie.
 
I've ripped TV eps with both anamorphic on and off and I don't see an appreciable difference in the picture. Both tests filled the same amount of the screen if the picture was originally 4:3. I've also done chapters of movies that are not anamorphic in both and also can't see a difference in the picture. So I just rip everything with anamorphic on.

As is usual with something like this YMMV, so do some test encodes (just encode one chapter of a movie or TV ep, not the entire thing) and see which you like better. There's really no hard and fast rule on when to use it and when not to use it.
 
cohibadad said:
ah. good info. so only use anamorphic if original is anamorphic. I've done many non-anamorphics with anamorphic on and haven't noticed any degradation. Maybe I will notice an improvement with it off. I did bmwfilms The Hire last night and it looked great (The Hire is kind of a HB nightmare as is Pixar Animated Shorts. HB doesn't recognize most if any of the video tracks). The problem I've been having with HB lately has been audio. The Hire audio gets out of sync at certain points up to about 10 seconds off. The same happened with Independence Day. The Empire Strikes Back AC3 is completely garbled and sounds like R2D2 dubbed the entire movie.
Click to expand...

Really, I did my Empire but haven't watched it. To be honest I haven't played very many movies that are ripped through the Apple TV yet to hear the AC3 track.
 
Check your Empire Strikes Back by opening it in Handbrake again and checking the audio options. If yours came from the boxed set, it is probably doing the same thing that mine is: showing AC3 as 4.1 rather than 5.1. I tried encoding it anyway assuming that AC3 passthrough meant "AC3 passthrough" (if the DVD version plays so should AppleTV version), but I got the same thing: bad audio (scrambled sounds like you describe).

Interestingly the ESB case says 5.1 Dolby Digital EX. When I play the DVD, the receiver shows this too. But Handbrake seems to be seeing only 4.1 rather than 5.1. The other discs from the box set don't do this, nor do the 3 prequel films- just ESB.

After trying another encode with just AC3 (not AAC + AC3) and getting the same, I gave up and went back to just an AAC version. My guess is that this is a Handbrake bug for this particular DVD. And yes, I did use MTR to get it into a folder on the hard drive. I haven't tried bypassing MTR and seeing if Handbrake can do the rip directly from the disk; maybe that would get a valid 5.1 option?

Otherwise, it seems weird if this is encoded on the DVD to thwart programs like Handbrake, yet not applied to the other 2 discs in the same set.
 
dynaflash said:
I suggest only using anamorphic (particularly strict) on dvd's that are anamorphic to begin with. For example, in the mid 80's some dvd's were done hard letterboxed, Con-Air comes to mind. This looks better with anamorphic turned off in HB as the dvd is not anamorphic. Anamorphic in HB does not create something out of nothing.
Click to expand...

What? There were no DVD's in the mid 80's. It's a product of the late 90's. Even with VHS tapes, you wouldn't find any "letterbox" movies in the 80's. That didn't start becoming popular until the early 90's. Also, Con-Air came out in 1997, not the 80's. :confused:

Now, many early DVD's were made for 4:3 tv's and did not have anamorphic widescreen. I think that's what you are referring to. The picture on these types of DVD's would be "zoomed" if they were displayed on a 16:9 tv...resulting in a less than optimum picture.
 
hehe, I must be getting old. I stand corrected on my timeframe. 90's. Either way Con-Air is hard letterboxed (at least the distro I have).
 
Antares said:
Now, many early DVD's were made for 4:3 tv's and did not have anamorphic widescreen. I think that's what you are referring to. The picture on these types of DVD's would be "zoomed" if they were displayed on a 16:9 tv...resulting in a less than optimum picture.
Click to expand...
Exactly, so they tend to have pillaring on the left and right as well as the bottom and top bars on a widescreen tv.
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/AnamorphicGuide#hard
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Interestingly the ESB case says 5.1 Dolby Digital EX. When I play the DVD, the receiver shows this too. But Handbrake seems to be seeing only 4.1 rather than 5.1. The other discs from the box set don't do this, nor do the 3 prequel films- just ESB.
Click to expand...

Exactly. It's just ESB. The others work fine. I am using MTR also. With AC3/AAC it plays fine in QT so I just started an encode with AAC only for now. I am using the trilogy 3 disk collection that was originally released on DVD.
 
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