AVI Synth Newbie (Crop & Resize)

Hi All, Sorry if I get some of the terminology wrong. I'm "Upskilling" myself to go from a one click solution like DVDRB to doing it all (Mostly) manually. I recorded a program onto DVD-RAM and set the recording up incorrectly, so now I have a video with a black border around it. What I want to do is to crop the black border and resize it back to DVD size and then burn it to DVD-R What I have done so far is: Installed AviSynth 2.5 and read through the help on the web page. My first script was: DirectShowSource("G:\DVD\Dr Who 3 and 4\Dr Who 3 and 4.VRO") And this failed, mediaplayer just displayed "Could not open as video or audio". So I remembered that DGIndex makes script files so I ran DGIndex and created the following base AVS file: loadplugin("D:\Program Files\DGMpgDec\DGDecode.dll") loadplugin("D:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\Decomb521.dll") mpeg2source("G:\DVD\Who.d2v",cpu=6) fielddeinterlace() The video plays with no audio in mediaplayer which I am using to see how the modifications to the AVS file come out. I used DGIndex to get figures as to how much to crop the video and made it to the closest multiple of 16 and I than manually added the following: crop(96, 64, -80, -64) But this has cropped off too much. Is there a more accurate way to calculate the correct amount of video to crop off? Once I have cropped the correct amount off I was going to add: BicubicResize(704,576) To get it back to full size. I was thinking of using QuEnc or DVD Author option in ReJig to make the final file? What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance for any information and advice.

You don't have to crop multiples of 16. The Avisynth documentation entry for Crop contains the rules. You can use DGIndex to measure the amount of pixels you need to crop; I personally use VirtualDub for that. I recommend FitCD for doing the resizing math to make sure you get correct aspect ratio.

I advice you to read the analog cap guide how to deinterlace (you don't have an analog cap, but it contains a nice and illustrative section about deinterlacing).

And to add to that : if your source is really interlaced and you go for DVD, keep it interlaced.