Custom aspect ratio to remove crawl?

[drewg]

My local CBS station does this annoying thing for their crawls. They take the 16:9 HD network feed, and "squish" it upwards to make room for a black bar at the bottom of the screen (see attached crawl.jpg). This way they don't loose any of the picture, and they can run a weather crawl with an easy to read background. The problem is that they totally destroy the aspect ratio, which I find highly annoying.

I played a while with the custom aspect ratios on my HD300, but I could not figure out how to just stretch the height of the picture to push the black bar off the screen & preserve the top's location and the width. Has anybody corrected for an aspect-ratio destroying crawl like this before & can offer advice? Care to share the advanced_aspect_ratio_extra_modes line from you're client's properties?

Many thanks,

Drew

[ericscottf]

You would need a non centered aspect ratio. to keep the top and only clip off the bottom. I don't know if sage can do this.

Also, lose, not loose.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

You would need a non centered aspect ratio. to keep the top and only clip off the bottom. I don't know if sage can do this.

I hope that's not true, but you may be right. I played with it for 15 minutes last night while the show was playing & annoyed the hell out of my wife...

Originally Posted by ericscottf

Also, lose, not loose.

I guess I need a grandma^W grammar checker, sometimes a spell checker is not enough

Drew

[stanger89]

You can do it, you just have to play with the settings. You'd need to adjust the crop/zoom setting to stretch it out a bit, and then offset it to chop the crawl off.

[drewg]

The key was to start with one of the "stretched" ratios, rather than source. I started with ZoomB, then reset the displayed picture to default values, then cranked up the vertical position. I wound up with this mode:

advanced_aspect_ratio_extra_modes=\ REMOVE WRAL CRAWL|blackstrip\=0,0|cutstrip\=0,0|source\=2048,1628,4096,4096,FrontEdgeToCenter,FrontEdgeToCenter,Relative,Relative,Relative,Relative

Hurray! It now looks totally normal!

Drew