Crop Without Resizing in Premiere?

[meldavid]

Hi if anyone can give some tips, I'm not able to figure out how to do the following.

I have a DV capture which is 720 x 576. There is letterboxing at top and bottom and overscan distortion on the sides.

I wish to import the file in Premiere and crop the sides so that I am left with a 704 x 576 frame, which I will then encode as MPEG2 for archiving. 704 x 576 is a DVD standard size.

I don't want to scale the video as that loses quality and will probably take longer.

I've tried to do the cropping with AVISynth but I can't get the file to be read at all, even after installing Canopus DV codec and ffdshow (prob. it's because the file is >4GB). I know how to crop normal AVIs with AVISynth, just not DV captures.

This is why I'm trying to use Premiere, as it can read the file just fine.

Please instruct me in noob steps as I don't usually use Premiere.


Thanks.

[guns1inger]

It should not make any difference. I have used avisynth to do what you are trying to do and more on DV source in excess of 25 GB without any problems.

Post your script and get some help - it will be much faster than trying to get premiere to do it.

[meldavid]

Well here is my script.

DirectShowSource("\\192.168.0.2\Pam\Captures\Prett y Persuasion.dv", 25) # Playback DV

# Remove Overscan from Foxtel broadcast
crop(14,12,-16,-12) # Crop pixels from AVI (left,top,-right,-bottom)

##################################################
# Full Resolution D1 PAL WIDESCREEN:
# LanczosResize(720,436) AddBorders(0,70,0,70) # PAL 2.35

##################################################
# Med. Resolution D1
# Lanczos4Resize(704,576) # PAL 1.78

# LanczosResize(692,544) AddBorders(6,16,6,16) # PAL 1.85 Blanked

# LanczosResize(704,436) AddBorders(0,70,0,70) # PAL 2.35

##################################################
AssumeFPS(25,True) # Convert from 23.976 to 25 fps.
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true)
# FixBrokenChromaUpsampling() # Fix Chroma upsampling bug of Canopus DV Codec V1.00

[guns1inger]

And when you open this in virtualdub, what error message do you get ?

Also, is this PAL to begin with ? If so you can skip the AssumeFPS statement.

Where do you add borders to get you resolution back ?

[meldavid]

This is the error I get:
AviSynth Open Failure:
DirectShowSource could not open as video or audio...

Video & Audio Returned: ClassFactory cannot supply requested class.


Ok you made me realise that if I want to use a 704 pixel width resolution then I have to resize it correctly or I'll get the wrong aspect ratio. You can help me with the maths if you like :P otherwise I'll just crop in proportion and resize back to 720.
I'm used to resizing AVIs with have square pixels. My capture is in 16:9 cause the Foxtel unit is set to output in 16:9. I used a camcorder to capture the movie using the AV inputs.

But yeah, I'd just like to get the file to read first.

[meldavid]

Actually after I have cropped it in proportion to keep the same aspect ratio, I should have a video that is 690 x 552. I can just resize this to 704 x 576 without adding borders and it should display fine, am I right?

The DV was captured on a Mac. Could this be the problem?

My last hope is just to export the DV as an uncompressed AVI which will eat up HD space but at least I know it will be readable by AVISynth.

[guns1inger]

Have you tried AVISource() instead of DirectShowSource() ?

If you throw in

AddBorders(14,12,-16,-12)

after the crop then you won't have to resize. Most of this will be in the overscan area, so it won't be seen.

[meldavid]

AVISource doesn't work too.

If I'm just going to mask the overscan distortion I can bypass AVISynth completely as CCE has a blanking feature.
I try to avoid both pillarboxing and letterboxing though, specially for 2.35:1 movies as the picture is already small on a computer monitor which doesn't overscan and prob. in the near future, LCD TVs won't bother with overscan either.

Think I'll just use a zoom filter on Premiere to do it. Are zoom filters on video-editing software really that bad?

[meldavid]

Another approach perhaps is to capture the DV at a larger size, say at 752 x 601, then crop it down to 720 x 576. I'm assuming that Premiere won't have to resize the video if I do it that way. But do I use the crop filter or the special processing tab during export?

[jagabo]

PAL DV only comes in one size: 720x576.