How do I crop black borders in free VSDC v 6.3.9.49 please?

[trabble]

Noobie. How do I crop black borders in free VSDC please?

I've searched and found several guides but none of them agree with what I am seeing in the editor itself. This is what I get:

Select Editor on button then select Crop Tools on the button bar that appears below that.

A panel opens up with the video showing and a dotted selector line. The only other button is Set orig size but I left that alone as I got in a mess before.

I drag the dotted selector line and drag to cover the central image leaving the black borders outside. (note I have the main background behind that set at bright green so I can see what is actual video.)

There are no other options and nothing on right click so I click OK button.

Back in the main editor there is no visible difference. The video is as before. When I export the project it is exactly as before with black borders.

In various guides I've seen ref to object properties window and a crop borders button but such a button does not appear on mine (VSDC v 6.3.9.49 free version) The nearest I see is the property: Cutting and Splitting and below that: Cropped borders showing the values. And at the bottom of the panel a grey area where 'Cropped Borders' appears twice, but they are passive and even right click does nothing.

What am I missing? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. (and also why would anyone want black borders by default!)

[Kakujitsu]

The easiest way would be to simply crop the source material before it is fed to the editor with a VapourSynth script.

[trabble]

Thanks, Kakujitsu. I'll keep that in mind. But meanwhile, I just found another workaround for anyone else with this problem:

Make sure you've set the background paper to non-black, eg green so you can see the vid area. (options - paper-settings -background color)

Crop as I described in my first post but as you do so write down the new size (in brackets just below vid)

Drag the selector lines to where the crop is (ie, excluding the black borders you don't want.)

Right Click the vid and select COPY.

Don't close VSDC before the following or do any other copy ops

Top left Projects - create new project - change the default size to the size you wrote down, then click Blank Project bottom left and OK.

You should now have a new blank black area the size you want on top of the background colour.

Right Click it and PASTE.

Your vid image will be wherever you cropped it so drag it across to fit in the black area.

Export Project REMEMBERING to change the name if necessary!

It's crazy to have to do all that but blame FlashIntegro for their poor guidance. Maybe somewhere there's a button or setting to just click and crop sensibly. Someone post if they ever find it! I think the problem is in the concepts. The provided crop is an 'object' crop (I think) whereas what I wanted was an entire video crop. So you have to fit the cropped 'object' into a new video. These concepts are not at all obvious to the newcomer.

[EDIT - Just discovered you can resize the video without creating a new project. Click on the project name in the projects manager and you see the projects properties in the properties panel. Scroll down to find the size adjuster. There is a drop down list of set sizes but also a custom config. You can then manually type in the width and height.]