Exporting Video as Widescreen

Ok, say I've just captured the latest BBC ONE ident (or anything else that's widescreen) off Digital Terrestrial, and currently have it in .avi format. The Ident is widescreen, but as TV Cards can only capture in 4:3, I have black bars at the top and bottom of the Video.

I have Adobe Premiere and have tried importing the AVI Video into a blank Widescreen workspace then cropping the video, but then it seems to be really blurry when I export it as a RealMedia file (or any other file type for that matter). The only way I can get a decent picture is if I import the video into a 4:3 workspace and don't remove the bars.

Sooo, how do I export the Video in RealMedia format and get rid of the black lines, without having a terrible quality file? Answers on a postcard. Thanks.

Have you thought about changing the output of your digibox to 16:9 non-letterboxed and then capturing that. The just resize the picture to a 16:9 ratio

I'm using an old ITV Digital Box, and it doesn't appear to have that option.

Just change the Television setting to 16:9.

But that gives me a widescreen picture. And as I don't have a 16x9 TV Card Capturing program (that's a good point, do they exist?), I have the black bars. Back to stage 1.

I would have expected it to come out as a 4:3 shape but with the people tall and thin, and you can then resize it as Larry says. Haven't used the software you've got so I'm not sure why that's not happening, but I'm sure someone else will know.

Use a program called VirtualDub. That has a facility that enables you setup how much you can crop from
the picture before you start to encode into raw AVI format, which is likely to take up a lot of HDD space.

Doesn't real encoder allow you to squash the anamorphic picture down to the right shape?

Press Menu then choose option 4, then option 2 then change the 'TV Screen' setting to 'Widescreen 16:9' then press red to exit (don't just press 'exit' the setting change won't work)

You might have to switch off and back on again to make it change to the new format if that doesn't work, change channels to a 4:3 channel (Sky News or Travel for example) and then back to a widescreen channel

I've had problems trying this.

My TV Capture Card (a Galaxy TV) has a 'Widescreen' setting, but it doesn't actually reshape the picture - it just crops it (wrongly) - so even if in Letterbox it leaves a large bit of top letterbox left, and all of the bottom letterbox AND some of the bottom of the picture, cut-off.

No matter what widescreen settings I used when viewing live (which never looks right anyway), all of these setting suddenly disappear when capturing live video - it just goes straight back to plain 4:3.

So I can sympathise with these problems - I have them too.

Mind you, my policy, until the day I get a DVD Recorder, is to stick with 4:3 centre-cut-out mode. This is so that I get the best possible resolution on tape when I record (as letterboxing reduces the vertical resolution and simply recording anamorphic reduces the effective horizontal resolution because it's squished).

Ok, thanks, I'll try that.

What do I do though if I already have the AVI files on my computer, and need to export them as Widescreen files? Some of the stuff I have, I just can't get again off Freeview. How do you guys do it?

TIA.