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Cropping video question…
Here’s what I want to do:
Take a full screen recording of my desktop.
Go through and create videos of specific windows. These would be videos cropped to the window, and output at the native resolution of that crop.
I do not care about standardized video sizes. This is for tutorial content. These videos will be inlined with text explanations (as they currently are on my website, the format is working great)
Here’s where I need help:
I understand how to crop videos and scale them to the frame size (I think that’s the term?). However what I desire is to crop the video and export at exactly the size of the resulting crop.
Currently I’m using screen capturing software to capture the exact portion of the screen I want, but this is very tedious with multiple setups. I rather do the whole screencast in one shot, then crop the specific areas I want in post.
Is there a simple way to get this done?
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17 Replies
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Set your Project to your output resolution (let’s call it 1280×720, or whatever resolution you want).
Add the screen recording to the Project. Set the spatial conform to “none” and adjust the media to fit your chosen resolution by positioning and scaling.
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Brilliant, thank you.
I believe this works for what I need so far.
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.. apparently not.
When I’m cropping, it keeps the aspect ratio, which is not what I desire.
Is there a way to crop with spatial conform set to none, but not have it maintain the current aspect ratio?
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Can you send a screen grab please?
You need to set the Project to your desired resolution/aspect ratio.
The easiest way to do this is to take a screen grab of the window you want to focus on, see what resolution that is, and set your Project to that size.
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I should add, if you want to do moves and zooms, then set your project to a multiple of that aspect ratio.
So if your window is 1000×1000, and you to do moves and zooms, set your project to 750×750 or 500×500 to allow more resolution to zoom in to from the original 1000×1000 window size.
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I’m not sure what you’d like a screengrab of specifically. Sorry if I’m being dense, but let me give an example.
I have a number of windows I’d like to crop to like this, to create multiple videos of the cropped windows. They are all non-standard sizes that I won’t know until I actually crop them.
Is there not an easier way to conform the project frame size to the clip (instead of the clip to the project?). It seems like needing to crop in an image editor, check the frame size, create a new FCP product with that frame size and transforming the clip as needed is a lot of work.
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I’m not sure what you’d like a screengrab of specifically. Sorry if I’m being dense, but let me give an example.
I have a number of windows I’d like to crop to like this, to create multiple videos of the cropped windows. They are all non-standard sizes that I won’t know until I actually crop them.
Is there not an easier way to conform the project frame size to the clip (instead of the clip to the project?)
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I meant a screen grab of what you are seeing in FCPX, but this helps too.
[Robert Randolph] “Is there not an easier way to conform the project frame size to the clip (instead of the clip to the project?)”
But don’t you want to crop to the size of a window that is part of a larger piece of media? FCPX will not be able to analyze the window size and create a project to that size. FCPX only sees the larger, original recording. You need to tell it what size to make the Project that fits the desired window.
Can you send a full size exported still frame of the entire UI?
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Here is a screenshot of my entire FCP screen atm: https://imgur.com/a/PYF8T1N
In this instance I would like to crop the video to the window named “MFreeFormEqualizer”. I want the output size to match the crop size with no scaling.
For most projects, I will need to do this 20-30 times per video (on top of the other work for the media content). That’s why I’m looking for the fastest workflow possible.
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From FCPX, can you export a full size PNG or JPG from your screen record?
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