Hello, everyone!

I apologize if this question's been asked dozens of times before, but how does one go about converting HD video to SD while preserving the aspect ration (i.e., letterboxing) in Kdenlive? Is there a rendering option to do this? I need to render HD video to DVD. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!
Norm

Didn't had to do this myself so far, so take your grain of salt. Why not first rendering to full HD and then using Handbrake to convert to SD?

There's a thread that may be helpful: https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=24247

Once you have choosen a matching project profile (some HD I suppose) and edited your footage, you can render your video to any of the available options from the render dialog. This may be SD or DVD, mpeg2 or mpeg4 or even HD with some lower bitrate - anything is possible.

If you need several output formats, you may save some time with rendering your video to a lossless format or HD with a high bitrate and then transcode (using any of ffmpeg, handbrake, mencoder, ...) the rendered movie to anything you need. This way effects and transitions, which slow down rendering, have to be computed only once for the lossless master.

capslock wrote:Once you have choosen a matching project profile (some HD I suppose) and edited your footage, you can render your video to any of the available options from the render dialog. This may be SD or DVD, mpeg2 or mpeg4 or even HD with some lower bitrate - anything is possible.

Thanks, guys, for the replies! It's great to find folks who are so helpful.

I was thinking about doing the above...but will rendering using DVD option preserve the aspect ratio? Or will it smush the video into the 4:3 frame and stretch everything vertically? Or maybe cut the left and right borders? The best solution is letterboxing...otherwise important stuff will get cut out left and right...or get stretched vertically, which is awful.

I guess I just have to try it.

I'll also go check out handbrake.

As long as you choose a 16:9 project and 16:9 output render format then your aspect ratio should be fine. You should not need to letterbox it. Output to a 16:9 aspect ratio format and then letterbox it as necessary if you are playing back on a 4:3 device. Let the letterboxing only happen if necessary because you are using a 4:3 viewing platform.

This is a commercial pay-software for Apple and Windows. Looking at the description I only see sales pitch and nothing that open source software such as handbrake can't do better for less bucks. The original poster works with Kdenlive on a Linux system, so how does a Windows/Apple software help?

moderator note: the post referred to by TheDiveO regarding commercial pay-software was removed for violation of forum rules.

I'm looking to take a 16:9 video originally recorded using AVCHD H.264 at 1920 x 1080i and frame rate of 59.94, and letter-boxing it as an SD with 4:3 aspect ratio. I am using kdenlive 0.9.6 on the KDE development platform 4.13.3 on Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS.

I tried a test render on a zone, using the MPEG-2 preset, but rescaling it, dropping the bit rate for video to 6000 and the audio to 192, but the video came out at 852 x 480, not the 720 x 480 I had hoped for, on account of the 1.2 ratio pixels?

I am migrating my work flow from Premiere Elements to kdenlive, if anyone has a detailed recipe for this I would appreciate it. New to kdenlive and this forum, so please advise if I should post this as a new forum topic.

Thanks!

You can have a try on the free video converter I'm using: http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/free-hd-video-converter.html
It helps me convert some SD videos to HD, I believe it will also help you convert HD to SD. Moreover, there's a setting window, you can change the aspect ratio there. Just go and have a check.