Converting Non Anamorphic LetterBox To Anamorphic 16:9

[Kevo]

Not sure if this well known or not but thought I'd share what i've recently discovered....

Basically I had a letterboxed, non anamorphic mpg file that I transferred to anamorphic 16:9 using the software VirtualDub mp2 and frame served to Canopus Procoder2 (You could use TMPGenc or other I suppose).

This involved cropping the top and bottom by 60 lines (NTSC) and upscaling the remainder to fill the rest of the screen. (Crop 72 for PAL).

The results were excellent, very smooth, no jaggies.
It looks like a true anamorphic picture. Comparable to some of Warner's anamorphic DVDs at least!
You cannot see the scan lines like you can with the 'ZOOM MODE' on a WS TV (especially with lower res NTSC) when viewing LB material.

Apparantly Virtual Dub with an added resize filter Lanczos3 is the one of the best ways to resize video files like this.

Oh...I also converted it to PAL in one fail swoop to boot

QUESTION:
Now I've got to figure out how to maintain the 5.1 ac3 audio and speed it up to match the PAL file.
Any ideas on this as all the software I have only seems to support ac3 2.0 channel stereo?

[vonhosen]

Two programs that may be able to help you are Soft Encode or BeSweet.

Soft Encode will allow you to take a 5.1 AC3 stream & render it out as 6 .wav files or vice versa . You may find it hard to get hold of as it was originally a £1000 piece of software & is a prized purchase on 2nd hand market. It was made by Sonic Soundry (Vegas Video's owners before Sony bought).

Other program BeSweet is a 5.1 encoder (not sure if it's freeware/shareware) & you can probably find links to it at www.dvdrhelp.com . Don't know for sure if it will do what you want but you will of course need 5.1 compatible DVD authoring software.

[Kevo]

Thanks, I'll have a look for Soft Encode.

I have BeSweet but find it's interface too complicated and fiddly!