converting interlaced 4:3 to 16:9 anamorphic

Laurence wrote on 10/19/2004, 10:28 PM

VirtualDub has a deinterlace "unfold" setting which separates the interlace fields into two side by side half height images. You can vertically resize this image then "fold" the two imagaes back into one interlaced image. I just used this setup to convert a 4:3 video into 16:9 anamorphic and it worked really well. The resized video is ever so slightly less sharp than the original but still quite acceptable, and amazingly, the interlacing is just fine.

Is there is a "unfold/fold" filter available for Vegas? If there isn't there should be. What an amazing tool when you're working with interlaced video!

Comments

Laurence wrote on 10/21/2004, 1:29 PM

update:

Actually the conversion worked better than I thought. What I didn't realize is that when you look at anamorphic video on a regular TV, lines are dropped and the whole image is deinterlaced in hardware. When I set up my DVD player to output widescreen, and my HD TV to mimic a widescreen (showing the full 480 lines and squishing them vertically) the converted video looked as sharp as regular letterboxed video.

I set up a DVD with both regular 4:3 footage and converted 16:9 footage and it looks great now on either format TV.

The converted footage really works well on a widescreen TV. It fills up the whole screen, has no interlace problems, has none of the fuzziness of deinterlaced video. Played back on a regular monitor, it looks exactly like deinterlaced letterboxed footage.