Attempting to crop video, leaving no black borders

[Noah Kadner]

Screenshots please 🙂

Noah

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[Bret Williams]

Set project to size you want. Then scale the video to fit within that frame. There’s no cropping necessary. This isn’t photoshop. Cropping doesn’t mean cropping in a photo sense. Think of it as a square mask. It doesn’t automatically enlarge. It simply masks.

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[Jeff Kirkland]

Either scale the clip in the info panel or use the transform tool and resize it with the mouse.

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Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Doug Metz]

You may not need to crop or scale if your project has the correct output dimensions – select the clip, and in the Inspector set Spatial Conform to ‘None’. Then reposition your clip accordingly.

You can change this setting in the browser or the timeline. Keep in mind that changing the setting in the browser will not affect clips that are already in the timeline.

Doug Metz

Anode

[Jimmy Lars]

Wow, thank you so much Doug. This was exactly what I was looking for (especially since I’m a beginner).

I just have one more question in general, not aimed at anyone in particular.
I use a MacBook Pro Retina display, so any screencap videos I create on this computer have their resolution automatically doubled. When I use QuickTime Player to play back an unedited video, the video plays back with the same “natural” dimensions (height/width) that I recorded. But now that I’ve essentially ‘cropped’ my video, the video’s “natural” dimensions seem to be doubled. I can confirm this by using the “Video –> Half Size” option in VLC.
Is there any way to fix this? I’m not that concerned, since I planned on uploading these videos to a online platform, and I think this still would have happened after the upload. But still, I am curious.

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For future reference to any beginners also attempting to crop/trim their video’s borders…

When you open Final Cut Pro, go to “New –> Project…” then in the “Video” dropdown box, select ‘Custom’. After that, input the resolution you want. (If you don’t know the resolution you want, take a screencap of the video you have, then crop/trim it to the desired area in Paint, Preview, or some other image editor, where you can then check the image’s dimensions in pixels. In general, that’s the resolution you want to input.)

Import your clip into the project, then drag the clip into the timeline. Click on the clip in the timeline (you can click & drag the playhead cursor to a desired time to make the future repositioning easier), then you’ll see the Inspector window open on the right side of the screen. Go to the “Spatial Transform” section and select ‘None’, then go to the “Transform” section and click on the ‘Show’ option, if its details aren’t already displayed.

From this point on, just fiddle with the “X” and “Y” coordinates in the “Transform” section, until you get your video to match how you cropped your video image in your image editor. If you need to be more precise, just zoom in/out using the little percentage thing near the top of the video.