Doubled image in a video editor program's work screen? (Help.)

[gastrof]

I recorded a show on my DVR, with the machine set to make a letterboxed 4x3 recording out of the widescreen broadcast. Off that I burned a DVD.

For reasons I won't go into, I decided to rip the VOB file off the DVD onto my computer, then open it in a video editor ("Avidemux") and crop it down to a 4x3 video format. (No black bars, and the sides removed from the widescreen video.)

Thing is, when I opened the VOB file in the editing program, the work screen showed something like this-



I tried to use one side of the doubled display to try and get the cropped video I wanted, but the software keeps crashing. Since the editor has worked in the past, I'm sure this doubling thing is causing the problem.

Has anyone ever seen this type of thing happen, and do you have any idea how to properly crop the video the way I wanted?

By the way, the DVD itself plays normally and the display comes out something like this-

 

[Jadzia]

I'm sure I've seen this before.

A lowish recording quality on the DVR (cf. long play mode) can mean the video is an abnormal shape like this, that will be stretched to fit the screen on playback. The smaller picture means less data, which is how it is achieves long play mode.

But having two images side by side... I don't know. Maybe an interlaced mode?

The video editor is obviously unfamiliar with the video format. Maybe it's only familiar with standard (dvd) formatting?

 

[farmkid]

You program may be displaying the top and bottom fields of the interlaced image simultaneously side-by-side. It seems like I've seen that as an option somehwere (maybe in VirtuaDub?) that you can set--not that I can think of any reason why you might want to. Poke around in the menus and see if there is anything about deinterlacing or display of the fields. Otherwise, try a different program, like VirtualDub, and see if it does the same thing.

 

[gastrof]

I'm sure I've seen this before.

A lowish recording quality on the DVR (cf. long play mode) can mean the video is an abnormal shape like this, that will be stretched to fit the screen on playback. The smaller picture means less data, which is how it is achieves long play mode.

But having two images side by side... I don't know. Maybe an interlaced mode?...

The recording was in the "SPP" format (2.5 hours per disc), but the recorder is able to burn to disc in different settings, so after you said that I tried burning a new disc in "SP" (2 hours).

The result was that when that version was ripped to the computer's hard drive, it played out normally on the editing screen this time, and I successfully cropped it down to fullscreen 4x3.

Thanks much for the idea that it was the mode setting that was responsible! I wouldn't have thought of it myself.

 

[Jadzia]