Full Screen Movies. This is the most often asked question I receive.
With all the different video playback devices on the market, Blackberry, Droid, iPad, iPod, iPhone, Xoom, Zune etc, there is a large variety in screen aspect ratios, which affect the way movies and TV shows are displayed on-screen. Even if you use a wide-screen device such as a Xoom, and convert a wide-screen movie, you still end up with black borders, and if you do the same on a square-screen device such as a Palm or an iPod Classic, the borders can take up more of the screen than the actual video.
This article is intended to clear up a lot of confusion about these black borders, why they are there and how to reduce them and how you can use DVD Catalyst 4 to make all your movies full-screen for whatever device you might have.
Why are there black borders?
There are 2 reasons why you end up with black borders.
*To conform with the DVD standard, many wide-screen movies have black padding (letterbox) added in order to make the actual video portion have the specific DVD resolution.
* When you watch a widescreen movie on a device that has a different aspect ratio than the actual video has.
By default, DVD Catalyst 4 removes the black borders from letterboxed video.
original
“remove black bars from file”
This leaves the entire video portion of your movie completely intact, however, when you watch the video on a device with a different aspect ratio, the video player will add some black padding in order to center the video.
(For indication purposes, I left the black borders added by the video player white)
If you are converting a non-widescreen movie, the process looks a bit different. There are no borders to be removed, so the video will just be sized to fit on the device screen.
How to get rid of black borders (make movies full screen)
In order to make movies full screen, DVD Catalyst 4 offers a couple of options.To get there in order to choose what you want, perform the following steps:
Enable “Power User”, then go into “Global Settings”
And go into the “Borders” tab.
The settings here will apply to all your conversions.
*no cropping:
(black border is from source video which is treated as actual part of the video by the player, white border is added by the video player to fit the aspect ratio)
*remove black borders from file:
(no black borders in the video results in a larger-sized video, white borders are borders added by the video player)
*remove black bars from device:
(no borders, however, the overlay on the sides represents the portion of the video that is removed in order to make your movie full-screen without changing the look)
*Full screen Stretch:
(widescreen stretched full screen on a square-screen device, check the angle of the clouds)
(widescreen stretched full-screen on a widescreen device, still distorted picture)
Summary:
By making your movies full screen onb your Xoom, iPhone, iPad or other media player device, there is always a compromise. Similar as what was with movies on TV before the HD TV’s became a common household item, parts of the sides of the movies will need to be cut-off (cropped), or you can stretch the video. With stretching (as shown in the screenshots) the way the movie looks is modified in order to make it full-screen. The movie size is increased in only the width of the movie (4:3 to widescreen device), making people look shorter, or the movie height is increased (widescreen movie to 4:3 device), making people taller. With cropping, parts of either the sides or the top and bottom are removed, leaving you with only the center portion of the video. For wide-screen devices, you will not lose that much if you convert a wide-screen movie, but as you can tell from the iPod Classic Screenshot, for 4:3 devices, you might lose close to half of the movie.
Personally I prefer the default “remove from file” option, because it gives you the full movie width. Sure you end up with some black borders, but you get to enjoy the little side-plots and funnies that a lot of movies these days have.
For additional information about black border removal, or for information on how to do it manually in DVD Catalyst 4, refer to chapter 10 in the included user guide. Besides the information mentioned in this article, you will find information about the other settings and options that enable you to tweak your conversions a bit more.
Additional resources for your Xoom:
A great FAQ for the Xoom can be found here: http://www.xoomfaq.com/
For questions and app information for your Xoom, have a look here: http://www.xoomforums.com/
Xoom How To Guide: http://www.tools4movies.com/2011/03/how-to-convert-dvds-and-video-files-for-the-motorola-xoom/
