cropping compressed movies?

[skidog]

i have a couple of movies that ended up having big black bars on the bottom and top of the video it's self (wide screen), the movies are already compressed into mpg, and avi, i'm not sure the easiest way to just crop out those bars without losing more quality in the movies.

i tried searching for this before posting but saw a couple to many recommendations so i'm not sure where to start, should i;

-uncompress the video's and then use tmpeg? or virtual dub?
or
-a friend told me about this program "trunk"

just wondering if anyone has tackeled this problem before, as i wasn't able to find a tutorial on it.

Derek.

[tigerman8u]

In Vdub unfortuneately you have to use the "full processing mode" to apply the filters. "Null transform" is the filter you use in Vdub to crop. Using the full processing mode you have to decompress and re-encode. I know of no tool that crops avi or mpeg 1/2 witout re-encoding. Would be nice if their was one.

[skidog]

seems so simple a thing... just cut part of each frame in a file...

ok, so in full processing mode, vdub should do it with no other programs, or do you mean i'll have to decompress it, crop, then recompress it in 3 seperate steps ?

(sorry it's been a while since i've gone anywhere near vdub)

[tigerman8u]

You click "full processing mode"
add the null transform filter and select the crop you want
select your encoder ie xvid, and configure it
click file, save as.
this will crop and re-encode to an avi.
IIRC you can do the same procedure with mpeg 1/2 in Tmpgenc Plus

[skidog]

aha! ok, i kinda worked my way thru it a bit, but i forgot that divx encoder at the end there, i was kinda wondering why i had a 4 gig file after 5 minutes of cropping..

thanks man!

[tigerman8u]

thanks man!

you're welcome