A Certain Aspect or Just a Point of View?

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

I have a bit of a surprising dilemma with my new video to do with mixed aspect ratios.

I'm used to this, I've had to deal with them many times before with amvs but with movies this issue becomes trickier due to the relative quality of the images and the difference in framing of animation vs live action. I'm using a lot of sources and some of them are 35mm and others are 16mm sources. In less technical terms this means that some are uber widescreen and other are not-so-uber widescreen (2.35:1 vs 16:9)

I'm not a fan of having parts of a video have letterboxing, so I tend to conform sources to one aspect ratio and stick with that for the whole video. This leaves me with two possibilities:

1) Crop the left and right of the 35mm movies and make everything 16:9
2) Crop the top and bottom of the 16mm movies and make everything 2.35:1

I'm not sure which is going to be best. The former probably safest in terms of keeping what I want in the frame (I wont lose eyes or mouths on close ups, for example). The latter maintains the glory of the (undoubtedly prettier) 35mm movies.

So, which should I go for? Cut off the tops and bottoms or cut off the left and right sides?

Assistance is needed...Help!

[azul-bloom.livejournal.com]

Hello,

I'm new to the community, but not so new to vidding. I, however, don't know how to rip a movie file and much thanx to [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] for telling me of the 3 programs I needed and pointing me to this community, but I still don't know how to use them.
I have downloaded:
DVD decrypter
TMPGEnc
DVDAVI

If anyone can point me to a place to get instructions or even jot down a few yourself, I'd be so in your debt!

Please help.
Thanx
Azul Bloom