Crop video

[weta]

What's the best way to remove the black frame from around Windows Media Audio/Video footage?

Thank you

[weta]

See image for black areas I want to remove.

[tinker]

From your picture it looks like you are displaying wide angle movie as a letterbox on 4:3 screen.
If you just remove black lines video will become distorted. For full and correct display on 4:3 screen, you will have to crop sides also. You can use AVIDemux (free) or get something like TMPGEnc Xpress (not free).

I am sure there will be others with software suggestions.

Other way is to encode as Pan and Scan, that way black lines will not be there on 4:3 screen, but picture will be narrower also.

[guns1inger]

Also, good players will add black bars to footage that does not have any to preserve the correct aspect ratio.

Cropping also means you will have to re-encode the entire video. Virtualdub is another option. Video->Filters. Add a null transform filter, then crop

[weta]

I've downloaded and installed the latest version of VirtualDub (1.9.4) and the Plugin Package. When I open the video file it loads into the editor, however when I try to play the file I get a message saying MISSING CODEC.

How do I resolve this issue?

I managed to crop the video using Adobe Premier CS4 Pro, however as you can see the quality of the result is quite poor (see below). Hopefully VirtualDub will give me a better result when I get it working correctly.

Thanks again for your help.

[jagabo]

Try specifying the DirectShow Input Driver (near the bottom of the File Open dialog) when you open the video file. If that doesn't work you may need to get a VFW WMV coded from Microsoft.

[poisondeathray]

ffdshow has a vfw wmv decoder that works with wmv3 and wvc1 , but you never mentioned what kind of wmv you have (use mediainfo) ; for example you will never get wma pro audio to work in vdub natively

avidemux as mentioned earlier has built in support and should work "right out of the box"

Neither avidemux or vdub will export wmv. (you have to re-encode to a different format)

For your premiere experiment, it's likely that you used the wrong settings either interpreting the footage, sequence settings, or upon export

[weta]

ffdshow has a vfw wmv decoder that works with wmv3 and wvc1 , but you never mentioned what kind of wmv you have (use mediainfo) ; for example you will never get wma pro audio to work in vdub natively

WMV3

avidemux as mentioned earlier has built in support and should work "right out of the box"

Liked this program, ended up with an unusable file which I assume requires re-encoding.

For your premiere experiment, it's likely that you used the wrong settings either interpreting the footage, sequence settings, or upon export

This was a very hit and miss exercise, as you can see I missed.

[poisondeathray]

Liked this program, ended up with an unusable file which I assume requires re-encoding.

Did you forget the extension? e.g. if you were saving an xvid/avi, you would have to append the ".avi" . e.g. "myvideofile.avi" .

[weta]

I've made a bit of progress with vDub, I've cropped and resized the video to 640 x 352 and saved it as an AVI file. My only problem is that the file has grown from 34mb to 1.5GB. Have I done something wrong during the conversion process, or does the file need to be recompressed?

Are there any comprehensive manuals covering vDub and Avidemux you would recommend, I've found the odd tutorial, but nothing in-depth.

[poisondeathray]

It needs compression in vdub, the default is no compression. video=>compression

When you crop a video, you have to re-encode (there is no lossless cropping)

I can't think of any generic tutorials, they usually cover specific topics. There are a few on videohelp
https://www.videohelp.com/tools/Virtualdub#guides
https://www.videohelp.com/tools/AviDemux#guides