Hi

I am currently converting 4:3 videos to widescreen. After a lot of mucking around, I use "handbreak" with the following settings:

Load your 4:3 videofile into handbreak. Click on "Picture Settings". Two windows pop up, "pre-view" window and a "Picture Settings" window.

Un-check "Auto Crop", Enter for the top part to crop "62" and for the bottom to crop "80". Then you may (or not) click on "filters" and de-interlace.

The "62" "80" appear to be the best settings maintaining the clips visual integrity.

I use H264 codec. There are more settings, the standard settings work well,


Cheers

from OZ

Alternatively you could do a decent upscale and crop to 16:9 using Avisynth with SimplSlugUpscale all under wine or a keyframed crop rather than arbitary one with Blender.

Another way to convert 4:3 to 16:9 in Kdenlive is to use the Crop effect and click the Center checkbox.