Video VHS from 4:3 to 16:9

Hello all.
New entry in shotcut and this forum.
Please i need help: I 've many old videos in VHS, edited in avi and converted in .mpeg for DVD player. The videos are in 4:3 format and now i would like to see them in 16:9 on my
HD TV. Searching in the forum i found 2 ways to convert my videos: Filter Video crop source and then add px for Top and Bottom (calculated) or crop source and than center. Wich is the best way for good qality ?
Thanks

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16:9 is more narrow than 4:3. The only question is do you want the full information from the old video - than you get black stripes top and bottom. The other way would be to cut the top and bottom area and have a full screen 16:9 video. Its not a question of quality its rather a question of personal likes and the goal you have. You can encode both ways the same quality.

I would just set your Video Mode (Settings > Video Mode) to 16:9 and just allow it to have black bars on either side. It’ll look like the Snyder Cut

If these videos are movies, they were already cropped from widescreen to 4:3 to fit the old TV format. If you crop them again to 16:9, in my opinion you’ll loose too much of the original movie


https://streamable.com/xseoq2

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Thanks all for the prompt and valuable answers. I will choose when to apply black stripes or crop and center. These are family old videos that i don’t want to miss.

Prompted by this dialog, I went looking and found a precious family video of my own.

(AVI, 640x480 mjpeg)

It took me 30 minutes to edit a 2-minute video using the Size, Position, Rotate filter with Keyframes to produce a video with no black bars and which lost none of the important action.

In many ways, it is an improvement on the original, as by enlarging the image much distracting background has been cropped out.

I could make a second pass through it, using Keyframes on the Rotation aspect of the SPR filter to correct for even more of the camera wobble.

The original is marred by black intervals where I click the “take a picture” button; on a third pass, I could erase these by doing frame grabs and fading the still frames in and out over the gaps.

Then there is the possibility of improving the image with some of the restorative filters such as wavelet…

Thanks for your help, kagsundaram, but I don’t know this program deeply, I have always edited videos with Pinnacle and Roxio. I am new to shotcut and need to know and experience its features. I will appreciate every tutorial on this subject, if you will point it out to me.

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There a plenty of tutorials here on the Forum, and on the Tutorials page.
As specific questions come up, we will try to point you to a tutorial video that answers that question.

As I don’t recall any that specifically address remastering home video to go from 4x3 to 16x9, I screen recorded the entire session I mentioned above. I am posting it here with any editing (of the editing video, LOL). It is long and tedious, without any narration, but if you can follow the cursor, you can see what I did. I had plenty of questions myself, so you can see the hesitations and do-overs.

FYI, with these settings, to fill the screen left-to-right is a 133% zoom, so that is my baseline.

(The final five or seven minutes should have been cut off; I was waiting for the Export to complete.)

I am also posting the original video…

…and the remastered result of the Shotcut session.

I hope this helps you get started, @casvin.

Thanks Kenneth for your useful tutorial, i will study it in the weekend, i am a full time grandfather…

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Thanks Kenneth for the tutorial. I’ve finished working on it now and I find it very useful for perfect image centering. My problem is that having a lot of 4: 3 home videos (about from 30 years) I think that my retirement time will not be enough to process them so perfectly. So I will opt for your solution for the most important videos (children etc.) and for Rilo’s solution for the others (holidays, panoramas etc.) alternating black bars above and below or image centering according to the movie. Thanks Kenneth, I really appreciate your interest in my problem. Thanks anyway to everyone in this forum.

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