View Image

Let's say you have captured a movie with black letterbox borders that you don't want in your final video and you want to view it in correct aspect ratio on a monitor. How much should you crop and resize the frames to get correct pixel ratio and at the same time force the width and height to be a multiple of, say, 16 (which is required for most codecs).
I soon got tired of doing these calculations time after time, so I made this little video size calculator. It can convert between standard PAL, standard NTSC, anamorphic PAL, anamorphic NTSC, SVCD and monitor. Well, it doesn't actually convert, just gives you some numbers to put into VirtualDub or other video tools. Try it!
Many people don't seem to be aware of the fact that you always need to resize your captured video to get correct aspect ratio on a monitor. At least if your capture resolution isn't 4:3. Another option is to use a media player that can alter the aspect ratio at playback time. This is actually an even better solution, because then you won't have to resize the original video at all, and resizing is no good for video quality no matter how good the resizing algorithm is.