Is there a way to crop a video without quality loss?

[deama]

So say I captured a video at 1440p, but I would like to get rid of some parts, basically crop the video to 1080p without having to re-render. Is there a way to do this?

[poisondeathray]

So say I captured a video at 1440p, but I would like to get rid of some parts, basically crop the video to 1080p without having to re-render. Is there a way to do this?

Usually not

But some formats like AVC, HEVC have a crop frame flag. It's basically a signal that tells a player to crop upon playback. This metadata is part of the official spec, but not all players software/hardware necessarily support it.

[jagabo]

Or you can remux it into a container that supports cropping (MKV). The only players I know of that support this type of cropped playback are MPCBE and PotPlayer.

[deama]

I don't want players I want to create a new copy of the 1440p that will be cropped to 1080p.

[JKyle]

I don't want players I want to create a new copy of the 1440p that will be cropped to 1080p.

There's no such way.

You cannot actually crop video frames unless you demux and decode the video stream first.
That involves a re-encoding process, which means you must go through a downgrade of the video quality.

[jagabo]

I don't want players I want to create a new copy of the 1440p that will be cropped to 1080p.

There's no such way.

You cannot actually crop video frames unless you demux and decode the video stream first.
That involves a re-encoding process, which means you must go through a downgrade of the video quality.

Or you could use a lossless compression codec or no compression and not lose any quality -- but the file sizes will be enormous. And playback options limited.