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Cropping HD video
I have 16:9 HD video. I need to crop the video so it is 208 x 204 pixels without any distortion achieved through horizontal scaling and without letterboxing. Basically lopping a certain amount left and right. Can anyone offer specific step by step directions? I would be eternally grateful. I’ve tried so many things: cropping in FCP, cropping in Compressor, cropping by exporting to Quicktime, etc., etc., but nothing seems to work.
Thanks very much.
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9 Replies
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What are you trying to deliver? a Web stream that’s the full picture or just a portion of the picture?
Jerry
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I’m trying to deliver a webstream that is cropped left and right, maybe top/bottom if necessary, so the central part of the picture will fit into the 208 x 204 area.
Thanks.
Harry Katz
hkatz@iijournals.com -
The format of the web stream?
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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Not sure of the streaming format. It’s at https://www.iijwm.com. There is a video area in the left center of the page, it’s a reshoot of video tab #2, the woman.
I need to get it into .flv format, which I can do from Quicktime, unless you know of any better conversion method.
Thanks again
Harry
Harry Katz
hkatz@iijournals.com -
flv’s are flash movies. If it’s good enough, it’s good enough I’d say just doing what you can already do. However there are more professional pieces of software for this.. Squeeze, Episode Pro…
You can crop to any dimension in Compressor. Do you use that software?
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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Jerry: I’ve tried many, many times to crop in Compressor but have never been successful. There are so many settings to account for. I went Saturday and Sunday to an Apple store and the “pros” there could not come up with a successful result. The best they could provide was to create a new sequence, filling in my size of 208x 224, selecting a pixel aspect ratio of HD (1440×1080), a QuickTime Video Settings Compressor HDV 1080i60, but when I exported to QuickTime Movie the file was 274×204, which still wasn’t 208×204.
I’ve also queried this forum about a year ago or so and was never able to get an accurate answer. These kinds of projects are picking up again so I was hoping to find a solution.
Harry Katz
hkatz@iijournals.com -
I just set a frame size of 208X204, cropped a square area of the image in compressor, compressed to an h.264 web stream in about 2 minutes. .. it works. You crop it, then set the frame size and it comes out as advertised from a 1080i HD source.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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Since you’ll end up looking square, crop square so you don’t distort, but that’s all you have to do man… just set the size in the geometry button and use the red outline to crop with try to make that crop square. It’s really easy, don’t over think it…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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Thanks, Jerry. I came in this morning to my office and realized that I had only previewed my last response to you yesterday, without actually posting… here is what I intended on posting:
Jerry: I gave it a few attempts and I think I finally ended up with exactly what I need… the secret was, as you indicated, cropping to a square shape in Compressor… it looks great. Thanks again for your assistance with this…
Harry
Now my challenge is to get it to .flv format. Since I’ve cropped in Compressor, the FCP file is in the 16:9 format. In the past when I’ve tried to crop exporting to .flv, using QT conversion from FCP, even with croppinig in the Flash format window that pops up, the image is still getting squeezed. I purchased DV Kitchen but that doesn’t have a cropping feature. Would you know of a way I could do this?
Thanks again, Jerry…
Harry Katz
hkatz@iijournals.com
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