Crop in Adobe Media Encoder CS4

[mgason]

Hi,
I have a video in quicktime format. Quicktime player says it is 720x480.
When I play it in Quicktime it has black bars top and bottom.
When I look at it in Media encoder it has black bars top and bottom.
I turned on crop in the input window, and adjusted to remove the black bars.
I set output to change output size. It said output 720x350.
makes sense.
the rest of the settings are f4v same as source default.

When I view the output window in media encoder it appears to have black bars on the sides?
when I load the video into a video player in flash with scalemode set on noScale it has black bars on the sides, top and bottom black bars are gone.

what's the deal, I just want it the same size with the black bars gone from the top and bottom, why do I have side bars now??

thanks
mark

[dan_hin]

might seem like a silly question...but have you considered that it might be the pixel aspect ratio mucking up your encode?

try exporting to 1024x480 with no cropping?

[mgason]

I am definitely not understanding something.
I did a default same as source f4v but set the output to be sized 1024x480 no cropping, got big black bars on the sides and top and bottom ones still there.

pixel aspect ratio, is that locked somewhere?
can you step me through the steps you would take to crop black bars off top and bottom.
quicktime says the original is 720x480, it has black bars of about 65 top and bottom. So I want to end up with a file of 720x350 no bars.

[dan_hin]

I haven't used the CS4 media encoder - all I can suggest is keep trying with different crops!