cropping video

[geek rock]

i've captured some files with imovie that are in letterbox widescreen. i want to convert them to DVD-standard mpeg-2, but crop out the black areas of the picture at the top and bottom so my encoding only concentrates on the actual picture of the image.

i did have a play around with ffmpegx, but whatever values i put into the "crop" part didn't seem to have any effect.

here's my original image (at exact pixel size):



can anybody help?

thanks

-Mark[/img]

[major]

Currently the ffmpegX crop control only work for ffmpeg and mencoder codecs (no mpeg2enc crop). You can however easily crop your source .mov in Quicktime player by using the "Mask" function. Take a screenshot of the movie and use Photoshop or Graphic Converter to make the video part black, and the area you want to crop white, and save it as PICT image. Then use "Mask" to load the mask image, and save as.. the resulting movie with dependencies. Finally encode it to mpeg-2.

[geek rock]

thanks very much, will give it a try. the only bad thing is about this is having to export to another DV file which takes awhile. oh well, i guess it's a solution..

[major]

the only bad thing is about this is having to export to another DV file which takes awhile

No need to export. Saving with dependancies takes 0.5 seconds.

[Wursti]

thanks very much, will give it a try. the only bad thing is about this is having to export to another DV file which takes awhile. oh well, i guess it's a solution..

I'm having the same problem. I was capturing a VHS tape and saved it as MPEG-2 file (DVD quality). Unfortunateley I have a few pixels of "mess" on the bottom of the video-file.

Isn't there a simple way to "cut" that bottom part without converting the
video in another format (and losing quality).

Any help is very much appreciated!

Thanks

Wursti

[major]

Use this method. It doesn't involve any reencoding or converting to another format.

Currently the ffmpegX crop control only work for ffmpeg and mencoder codecs (no mpeg2enc crop). You can however easily crop your source .mov in Quicktime player by using the "Mask" function. Take a screenshot of the movie and use Photoshop or Graphic Converter to make the video part black, and the area you want to crop white, and save it as PICT image. Then use "Mask" to load the mask image, and save as.. the resulting movie with dependencies. Finally encode it to mpeg-2.