Cropping the movie

[jwfc]

Hello. I tried finding a tutorial on this since I am new to video editing but did not have too much luck. I am using the Hauppauge USB PVR 250 to record my TV shows (MPEG 2 is the format). It leaves an extra black area on the left hand side, and crap pixels on the top. I noticed I can crop it out by using the DivX Pro version in VirtualDubMPEG2. The only problem is when I do this and I try to save it as an .avi to compress my video as well, the audio ends up behind the video. I go into the Audio->Interleaving-> and change the audio start time to try to match the video. It is pretty tedious and was wondering if there was a better way to just crop out the bad areas, and compress my video. Thanks!

[guns1inger]

What do you ultimately want to do with the video ? Are you converting to Divx in the end, or authoring DVDs ?

[jwfc]

I'm really not doing much to them at all. I kind of just wanted a compressed cleaned up version of my tv show clips. It really doesn't matter if it's divx, xvid, or some other compression. I just tried using what VirtualDub already had in it.

[guns1inger]

Virtualdub doesn't have any codecs - it uses those available on your system. You could try installing Xvid, or even better would be AutoGK. You can access it's custom cropping using the hidden setting menu with ctrl_f9

[jwfc]

I have Xvid installed already, and in the end, I am having some serious issues. Here is the entire scenario in a nutshell:

- Recorded a tv show using Happauge PVR 250 (USB external one)
- used the Hauppauge tool (nanoPEG editor) to extract a portion of the whole tv episode
- would like to crop off the left and top edges and compress video

methods that i have tried:
1) using virtualdubmpeg2. I can convert it using divx which does a decent job but there is ALWAYS audio synch issues. I have a lot of clips and trying to guess how much the audio lags by seems cumbersome. I have trouble making it look exactly correct, and it is time consuming. I tried using the "Full Processing Mode" as well and selecting mp3 128kbps to see if that worked any better, but it did not. I get an error about no appropriate decomrpessor found (0x0050) or something along those lines. I just remember there were 0s and a 50 at the end.. I also tried using "Full compression" for the video instead of using "fast recompress" and the audio still lagged. I read somewhere on this board about installing the AC3 codec so I did that and tried that, but that did not work either. I also tried loading my whole tv episode into virtualdub, selecting the portion I wanted with In and Out markers, and saving that as an AVI with the same scenarios listed above and the audio still lagged.

2) VirtualDubMod. I tried it in here, same problem.

3) AVIDemux. The MPGs from the Hauppauge card will not load. The program gets stuck.

4) Adobre Premiere Pro 1.5. Same problem as (3), file will not load.

5) MEgui. I read someone used that application from this board for their Hauppuage clips and I get some error about .NET not being installed on my computer but in the add/remove programs, it is there.

6) AutoGK. Files do not load in there either. It says there is no video.

I have exhausted my ideas and tried finding information from this site, but I am out of luck. Any ideas ?

EDITED:
Well I just tried using VideoReDo to crop out my video and then convert it using VirtualDub and that seemed to work. Should I use that method for now on?

[guns1inger]

Will AVIDemux load the video pre-edit ?
Perhaps NanoPeg does something AVIDemux (and the others) doesn't like.

Post a G-Spot screenshot of one of the mpegs, just for a look.

[jwfc]

Here is the first original video taken from the Hauppauge 250:
http://img14.imgspot.com/?u=/u/07/185/04/gspot1copy.jpg

Here is the smaller video taken out with nanoPEG Editor:
http://img14.imgspot.com/?u=/u/07/185/04/gspot2.jpg

Yes AVIdemux will load the pre-edit.

And sorry, this is a probably a super dumb question, but I've tried using the Xvid codec as well as the trial version of the Divx Pro version. Since I am not familiar with all the functions of the Xvid codec, I use only what I read on some tutorials (null transform filter to crop out the left and top of the video, resize filter to make it smaller, AS @ L5, smaller bit rate than it was originally (2000 in my case I think, and then the rest of the options, I left alone I think. Are there other things I should worry about? Or should I purchase the DivX Pro and use that? Thanks!

[guns1inger]

You can do everything you need to do in AVIDemux. It will crop and edit video. As it will load the pre-edit version, it implies nanopeg does something odd to the video. However, if you learn how to edit with AVIDemux, you may not need nanopeg for this exercise anyway.

Edit : looked at the images. Interesting thing. Before nanopeg, the video is identified as mpeg2. Afterwards, it is identified as mpeg1. I would stay away from nanopeg as it doesn't seem to be very good for the video.

[jwfc]

thanks! I'll give it a try tomorrow!