Cropping the videos

[indijay]

Hello folks,

YouTube/Vimeo has a few videos of my interest where most of the frame covers the speaker's face and one corner shows the slides. Ideally, it should be the other way around, but anyways, thats how the videos are. The information on the slides is far more interesting than the speaker's face. So ideally, I would like to crop everything else except the slides in the resulting video, hoping that it will enlarge the slides enough to be able to read better.

Is there any way I can achieve this function? If there is any tutorial for this job, it will make my life a ton easier.

Thanks in advance.

[manono]

All you'll wind up doing is making big slides so blurry you won't be able to read anything. But yes, it can be done.

Can you link to one of the videos? One of the shorter ones, perhaps?

[womenarefree]

You can use bandicam to grab the rectangular selection and you can use movavi to do the same thing. movavi would be capable of enlarging your resulting videos after you go through that first step. Many other softwares can also do this thing or parts of you are trying to do, but these are the first tools that I've been liking lately and can recommend to you as far as being pretty easy tools (not lightning fast, though) that will get this job done. Please note movavi was only made to be working correctly in windows XP using my specific hardware, I had to change the OS. Also, I had to remove expansion video cards and use the onboard video to make these functions work with movavi.

[mleise]

As a perfectionist I'd download the highest quality version from the video platform. For YouTube that's typically not the largest file, but the one encoded in VP9. Then use any free video editor that is a little more sophisticated than Movie Maker to do the cropping. For the download part you may find web sites that provides you with a direct download link. (Search for "download youtube".) If that fails, there are little programs like Free YouTube Download with a user interface or YouTube DL for the command-line (which should support Vimeo). As for video editors, AviDemux could work. Searching for the editor name + "crop" should give you heaps of tutorials.

If you chose to grabbing a section of the screen, beware of downscaling. If you find a high resolution 1080p version of the presentation, but your laptop monitor only does 1366x768, you capture a downscaled version of the video, which is less than ideal when you want to see more details.