Cropping with Handbrake

[Cave Man]

I'm having trouble with manual cropping with HB. I have I, Robot that is giving me problems from 1080p down to 720p with HB - the infamous black bars. HB is setting it a 720 high, but it should be 544 high to remove those bars. I manually set crop, increasing the top and bottom to 88 (720-544=176. 176/2=88). However, when I set this, HB just squeezes the picture top to bottom, keeping the black bars. What am I doing wrong?

 

[Cave Man]

I still don't have a solution, but here's what I ended up doing (with two surprises).

1. Used HB to go from Blu-ray (with tsmuxer video options disabled) to 1080p at 2300 bit rate. This generated an 18 gb file with DPLII and bars on the top and bottom.

2. Used HB again on the file generated from 1 with Apple TV preset, but changed to 1280x720 and set bit rate to 5 mbps. Transcoded just fine, but now the bars were gone! (Surprise #1). Dropped it into iTunes and tried to sync it to the Apple TV. It was rejected. WTF?

3. Opened up the 1080p file from 1 above in Quicktime and played it. Turns out this Blu-ray movie has a variable frame rate? Frames were going anywhere from 20 to 60 fps (surprise #2).

4. Repeated #2 but forced 24fps and now everything is peachy...

This was the most challenging transcode I've ever had to do, but other than lacking AC3 I'm pretty happy with the results.