Cropping Video in Sony Vegas

[snapware]

I hate to have to ask this, but after looking in the help documentation and then the forum i didn't see this.

I have a video, i simply want to crop the video without resizing so this way i can have black letterbox bars on the top & bottom of the video, how is this done in Vegas? i went into the begas pan/crop tool, but there are only presets to select, i can't seem to crop it at the exact size i want.

[snapware]

for a quick fix, I created a photoshop document with black bars, but that seems a lil bootleg to me still

[guns1inger]

Add a video track above your footage. Put a black screen (media generators) on it. Use the track motion to position it. Or create a still in photoshop with black bars 60 pixels wide at the top and bottom. Save and png. Import to the top track and set the compositing to clear the centre section.

Of course, all you get form this is letterbox, not 16:9

[kschang]

I would use AVISYNTH to do this... Should be fast enough, but that's just me.

[crazy14muzic]

heres another way

[crazy14muzic]

I don't use the presets. You can drag the handles around the box to resize your area or you can change the width and height numbers directly.



Good luck

[guns1inger]

I don't like to do it that way only because, unless your footage was shot with matting in mind, you will often have to actually shift the position of the original footage to keep heads etc in frame. It is easier to do if you are working behind an overlay.

[crazy14muzic]

good point guns1inger

[snapware]

Good ideas everyone

crazy14muzic, doesn't that actually increase and stretch the size of your video which will essentially degrade the quality?

[crazy14muzic]

no thats why i included the video preview in the picture

unless you check the box "stretch video to fill output frame size (don not letterbox)" in the render as dialog window

[mikiem]

Can as mentioned use overlays, cookie cutters I *think*, can use track motion by itself I believe, can use the crop dialog as mentioned with aspect & fill frame unchecked, figure there's a few more ways, but in the end it's so much faster in avisynth or v/dub, or adding during render in TMPGEnc, I don't know it's worth the bother.

[guns1inger]

For a very quick guide to using Vegas to border a clip and remove garbage in the overscan area, have a look at this https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1450941#1450941

Method two is the one to look at, but it wont do full letterboxing