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In this part of the series, we're going to take a look at picture settings. If you're
using the Mac, you can get to it by clicking this button right here and you'll get a "picture
settings" window. If you are on Windows, it's going to look something like this instead.
You've got all these tabs towards the bottom, and "Picture" is where you're going to access
the options. They're essentially the same between Windows and the Mac - it just looks
a little bit different. Now one nice thing when you're using the Mac is you're going
to be able to hit this "Preview" button here, and you're going to get a preview window,
so you can see as we start messing with some of these options, you'll be able to see live
how it's going to affect your video - as opposed to Windows, the way things are going to work
is that to see what you've changed you're going to have to hit "Preview" and then it's
going to have to generate a preview, and it'll probably have to play it back in VLC. So just
keep note that if you're using Windows and you make some changes, you're going to have
to generate this preview and watch and then hopefully you'll have an idea as to what exactly
you changed and how everything turned out. But we're just going to use the Mac interface
for now because it makes everything a lot easier. So we'll start with "Anamorphic" and
what this means, and what it does. To start off, first of all we're going to be using
"Anamorphic Strict" most of the time just because what happens is.... we've got basically
"pixels"of information here, right? Basically all the detail here, ignoring these black
bars for the moment. When you keep Anamorphic at "strict", you pretty much always keep all
of that detail. When you're using "loose", sometimes you can get some resizing going
on, and we'll get to that in a bit. But "Anamorphic Strict" is what we usually use. And I'm going
to just quickly go over what all of these things mean, in case you've been lost when
you looked at the word "Anamorphic" and thought "what's that all about?" So "Source" first
of all is talking about our source resolution, so the file that we loaded into Handbrake.
In this case it came from a file on the hard drive which came from a DVD, and this was
the source resolution that was stored in this file. "Output" is talking about when we spit
out a new file in Handbrake, what the resolution is going to be there. And you can see right
now it's the same as the "Source" - we're going to retain all of the detail here, and
we're going to retain these black bars the way we've got everything set up right now
- we'll be changing that later. But just note that right now it's the same as the source.
And anamorphic on the other hand is sometimes a little tougher to wrap your head around,
so I'm going to try and explain it in a way that hopefully makes sense to you. So what
Anamorphic does... even though we've got 720 pixels wide, Anamorphic is a little flag built
into the video that says "even though you've only got 720 pixels to work with, stretch
it out so it looks as though we've got 853 pixels wide on the screen. And just to show
you what I'm talking about there, I'm going to turn Anamorphic "off" for a moment, and
just watch the picture.... and you'll see everything just squished a little bit. The
height didn't change, but the width just squished. This is the way that the video was actually
stored on the DVD... what they did was... it was a widescreen video, they kind of "squished"
it down so it would fit onto the DVD, and they set that little anamorphic flag that
says "things aren't going to look right, so stretch it out!" And of course, they knew
exactly what numbers to be plunking in for that - we'll go into that a little bit later.
In any case, hopefully that helps you wrap your head around this concept of "anamorphic".
It's important to note that it doesn't always mean to "stretch things out", sometimes it
means to "squish" them, but in any case when you see this "anamorphic", chances are that
whatever pixels were stored are being manipulated to be stretched or squished. So by default,
a lot times when you pop into Handbrake, it starts off with a setting of "anamorphic loose".
We'll look at that, and you'll see I've just changed this to loose, and nothing here actually
changed. Loose with a modulus of 2 is almost exactly the same as "anamorphic strict" - there's
pretty much no difference at all except that every once in a while when you load a file
in, especially if you've loaded a preset, what can happen is for some strange reason
you'll find that your width is down a little bit (maybe because this modulus was set to
something other than 2), and then you'll go to encode your videos and you'll be missing
a little bit of detail there. You won't necessarily notice it when you're watching it, but that
detail will be missing - and that kinda bugs some people. So keeping things at "Anamorphic
Strict" is the safe way to go most of the time. Now you might wonder "what about if
I have material that wasn't anamorphic?" - which, if you recorded something on your computer,
or a lot of times from a video camera, you won't have that anamorphic flag. Another example
is a BluRay - BluRays don't use those anamorphic flags. What you can do is actually leave anamorphic
at "strict" anyway, and things will end up being okay. I'll just show you an example
of that by pulling this out of the way, and I'm going to pull in the Picture Settings
window from a BluRay. So this was a 1080p BluRay - you can see that 1080 is the height,
and BluRays don't actually store that anamorphic flag. But what happens when I set this to
"strict" is that Handbrake takes a look and says "ok, there wasn't an anamorphic flag,
so what I'm going to do is make one up, but I'm going to make it the same size as the
output". So there's actually not going to be any sort of a change - there's not going
to be any extra stretching or squishing going on. Everything will be okay. So you might
wonder "should I set things to 'none' if I know there isn't an anamorphic flag and set
it to 'strict' if I know that there is?" You could do that, but the downside you're going
to run into is.... you'll get into the habit where you'll do a whole bunch of BluRays,
you'll set it to "none", and then you'll encode a DVD and you'll go watch it after and things
won't look right, and you'll realize "oh no! I forgot to set anamorphic!" So setting it
to strict is a good practice to get into, because when you do it all the time, things
will just about always look right... 99% of the time everything's going to look just fine,
and you're not going to run into any headaches. And that's 1 less setting you're going to
have to worry about if you keep setting it to "strict" you can focus on worrying about
all these other options in Handbrake, and you won't have to worry as much here. So let's
take a look at "anamorphic none". We already briefly saw that, and as we saw here it kinda
squishes everything. When might you want to use anamorphic "none"? Well if your material
wasn't anamorphic and you don't want Handbrake adding a little anamorphic flag there for
you, you could use "anamorphic none". But in the case of a video like this that originally
was anamorphic, we've got a problem - everything's going to look a little bit squished. So what
you could do here is select "Keep Aspect Ratio", and you're going to see it's going to fix
the way the image looks - everything will look correct - but everything got smaller.
And you might wonder, "Why did everything get smaller? That's probably not so good!"
And you'd be right to notice that. What happened here? Remember our source was 720x480. Our
output now is 720x404 - we just lost some pixels here. Instead of 480, we've got 404.
What Handbrake did instead of stretching the 720 to be 853, it shrunk down the height to
be 404. We actually lost those pixels of information - not that we necessarily completely lost
it and they just "went out into space", but Handbrake had to resize things, and you kinda
lose detail any time that happens. So you really want to avoid doing that. Just setting
anamorphic to "strict" all the time is usually going to serve you well. So let's look at
the next option here - anamorphic "loose" which we already talked about a little bit.
But when might you want to use "anamorphic loose"? Well a great time to use anamorphic
loose is if you want to resize a video. This one came from a DVD, and we might not necessarily
want to make this a whole lot smaller, but if we did, what we could do here is just start
pressing down on the "width", and the "height" is automatically going to start moving down
too. So we don't have to worry that maybe we made the width smaller but forgot to make
the height small enough - everything will stay in the proper aspect ratio so that everything
will look correct. Now you might take a look at this "modulus" area and see it's set to
"modulus 2" and wonder what this setting does... this... if I change this to "16", what this
is going to do is make sure that the width is divisible by 16, and the height is divisible
by 16. You might wonder "well, why does that matter?!" The truth is, it used to matter
because the encoder Handbrake uses really liked when things were divisible by 16 because
of all the fancy math it does to encode your videos. But that's not really the case anymore.
One downside if you use 16, and I'm actually going to pull this out of the way, and pull
back in that BluRay, is if we set this to "anamorphic loose" and we set this to "16",
it's going to make sure that these are both divisible by 16, right? But if you take a
look at our "output" now, we just lost 8 pixels there. We had 1920x1080 and now we've got
1920x1072. To make this height divisible by 16, it had to kind of "shave off" 8 pixels
- and these aren't pixels that just "vaporized" and went into no-where, but it had to resize
things, and as we mentioned before, you generally want to avoid resizing things unnecessarily
because you loose a little bit of quality. What Handbrake also did in this case was it
modified this anamorphic flag so that everything's going to look correct - if we actually were
to create this file - that's the nice thing about anamorphic whether you're using "strict"
or "loose", everything will usually look correct... but we still lost that little bit of information.
So generally try to avoid "anamorphic loose" unless you're trying to resize, but if you
resize something, try and stick with "modulus 2". You can use "16" to zip something down,
but then, say I wanted this to become a 720p video, then I'd bring it close, and then I
might set this to "modulus 2" just to make sure that it's not removing some extra pixels
unnecessarily - we're kind of keeping everything that we can. So finally let's take a look
at "anamorphic custom". What's this about? Well everything just got a little bit confusing
here - we'll actually pull this out of the way and pull back our DVD just because this
is going to display "anamorphic custom" a little bit better for us. I'll just set this
to "strict" first to get everything looking the way it was, and now we'll go to "custom".
So when might you want to use custom? If for some reason you had to manipulate the width
and the height that are actually stored in the file, you could do that here while keeping
things at anamorphic as opposed to if you were using "none" and trying to do the same
thing. But the other thing that "custom" will let you do is change the aspect ratio as you
see it on the screen. This anamorphic flag here that says basically to stretch things
out or squish them. You might wonder why you'd ever want to do that. And normally you wouldn't,
but every once in a while somebody might send you a video... maybe from a vacation they
went on that they filmed on their camera... and it turned out that their camera was pretty
buggy... and maybe things looked something like this. So you go to play the video and
you're like "oh gee.... something wrong happened, a precious memory that they thought they had
is going to be gone forever as far as a video is concerned". What you can do in "anamorphic
custom" is you can play with this PAR width. And that stands for "Pixel Aspect Ratio".
And by increasing this you can stretch things out, and by decreasing it you can squish them
back down. So in this case, if we received a video like this, and we were going to try
and fix it, we might just trial-and-error it. So it was at 10, we'll try 20 - that made
it a little bit better. Let's try maybe 50 - things just got way too wide. And in this
case eventually we'd figure out that "oh, 32 looks pretty much perfect". Now you might
wonder about this "display width" and "PAR Height"... generally you don't want to mess
with those just because a whole bunch of other numbers can start changing on you. There are
a couple little bugs in Handbrake here that'll mess things up for you - so I might be fine-tuning
something here, and then I go here and as soon as I even click here... as soon as I
let go of the mouse button.... there we go! It just changed all these numbers on me. And
it just causes a big headache. So try and avoid playing with the other stuff, just focus
on this PAR Width section until you get things looking correct. Now one other thing to note
is that when I've played with this PAR Width and changed things, it doesn't actually change
what the size of the file is going to be. If you look here and see, the file size is
going to be the same. We've go the same resolution actually stored, right? All we've done is
we've messed with this anamorphic section to tell the video player to stretch things
out or to squish things down when it's playing them back, but we're not actually storing
any information - so even though you might see these numbers and say "oh wow, 1600 - that's
going to be a really huge video file!"... No, it's going to be exactly the same as it
was before, because by playing with this number, we've only affected the way things are going
to look, not the way that things are stored. Now going back to the Windows side of things
for a second in case you've been following along using the Windows side, and are wondering
what's going on because things aren't looking quite the same.... Unfortunately in the Windows
part of things, playing with these values here doesn't always work correctly - you'll
run a preview, you'll change this and say "hey, things should have been wider, but I
did a preview and they didn't actually change"... Those are some bugs that are in the Windows
version. And I think probably because so few people actually use these settings, it's probably
not something on the priority list. But in any case, while "custom" might cause some
hiccups for you on the Windows version, the other ones generally work as you would expect
- the only downside being that when you make a change here, you have to generate a brand
new preview, and that is the only way you see the changes that you made - as opposed
to when you're using the Mac, you can just see things as you're changing them. So you
make a tiny change, you see what's going to happen right away, and there's not going to
be a big deal. So finally, let's look at the "cropping" section and figure out what that's
all about. Well like I said before, we've got these black bars on the top & bottom and
the left & right. Normally you wouldn't want to encode these into your video file. There
are a couple reasons for this... First of all, it just wastes space. We've got 720x480
- it's going to have to save all of those, but a lot of that is just useless black bars
- at the top, bottom, a tiny one on the left, and a tiny one on the right. So it's a good
idea to get rid of those for that reason. Another reason it's nice to get rid of those,
is if I were playing this back on a computer, and I had it maybe in a window in the top
corner of the screen while I was doing some email or some other work, those black bars
are taking up valuable desktop space. One more reason that it might be a good idea to
get rid of these is if I were trying to play this on an ultra-wide-screen TV, and I've
encoded black bars, that's added information that the TV thinks is part of the picture.
So if it's got to add it's own black bars, this might complicate things there - I might
end up with extra black bars on the left that I didn't have originally, or even just thicker
black bars on the top & bottom. It just creates a big mess. So generally we want to cut those
off. A nice easy way to cut those off is to set "cropping" to "automatic". When you do
that, Handbrake will look for what it thinks are those "wasteful black bars", and it'll
automatically chop them off for you and plug in numbers here. Now Handbrake gets this right
MOST of the time. Sometimes it doesn't - sometimes it'll cut off a little bit too much, or sometimes
it won't cut off enough. In this case, you can maybe see a little extra black here that
if we were really picky, we might want to cut off - and in that case, we'd set this
to custom, and adjust until we had things exactly the way we wanted. By the other token
if it cut off too much, we can just start bumping down these values and we'll see some
of the picture is restored. One final thing that you could use custom for - but I strongly
recommend against..... is.... let's say we had a widescreen video and we wanted to do
a really "hack" way of turning it into a full-screen video. Well, we could just chop off a whole
bunch from the left, and we could chop off a whole bunch from the right. And we'd end
up with something "kind of" resembling a full screen video. And going the other way, if
you had something that was full-screen and you wanted to do a really "hack" way of making
it widescreen, you could chop off a bunch of stuff from the top, and chop off a bunch
of stuff from the bottom. But you usually don't want to do this because you're literally
chopping off information - this is information that you're kinda "vaporizing". And some of
this information could be somebody's head, or it could be somebody who was standing off
to the left or somebody who was standing off to the right. So I strongly recommend against
using cropping for that purpose, but hey.... if you're really intent on making your fullscreen
video look widescreen..... I mean, there's nothing I can do to stop you. Just be aware
that not everybody else may enjoy the video as much as you. A final note here, you'll
notice that even though we have anamorphic set to "strict", our output number has gone
down. That's just because we have cropped things. And that actually makes sense. If
I set this back to automatic, we had 720 pixels wide - if we subtract the 2 little black bars
we chopped off from the left, and the 2 from the right, that makes sense that we're now
at 716. By the same token, we chopped off a whole bunch of black from the top and the
bottom, 56 and 60 - if you take 56 and 60, and you subtract them from 480, you're going
to get 364. So that actually makes sense. So don't get into the habit.... some people
will remember the part where "I want my output to be the same as the source, I don't want
to lose any information".... and they'll go ahead and they'll try to manually start adding
stuff back, but you don't want to do that when you've cropped off these black bars.
Because now if we start manually forcing our output back up, what's going to happen is
we're resizing things from the original back to something wider - we're taking the original
image and enlarging it to fit a larger frame. And we're not getting any extra quality by
doing that. We're just taking up extra filesize, and we're actually kind of losing a little
bit of detail in the process. So generally, if you set anamorphic to "strict" and you've
done some cropping, and your output number is different from the source number, don't
worry about it - that's probably just from the cropping. And I think that pretty much
covers everything there except to just remind you if you're using Windows, make sure that
any adjustments that you've made... make sure you check out a preview to make sure that
what you THINK is happening is actually happening before you go and encode your entire video.