Stretching and Cropping Video Files Help

[Shuroko]

Hi there,

I'm new to this forum and am relatively new to movie-making as well. I am looking for a solution (probably simple) for something

I have been looking to stretch out an .AVI video clip, for example, crop out one side of the video and then just stretching the remaining part out to fill up the screen. The only program I've used that can do this is Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (trial version). I was thinking about buying the program, but for something like this, I don't know if the full version would be worth the money if I was using it just to stretch out video. I have searched and have come up with nothing.

My main question is, are there any programs that I can use other than Elements and (I think) Vegas? If so, I it'd be very helpful

Thanks for your time

[Baldrick]

If you are just going to crop you can use free tools like Virtualdub, open the avi, add the Null transform filter under video->filters and you can now access the Cropping button under video->filters. Crop the video. Select video->compression and choose a video compression or the video will be huge. Last save as a new avi.

And welcome to our forum!

[Shuroko]

Thanks a lot for that . One more thing, is there a way to stretch that video once cropped? It's about half the size as the regular file

Thanks

[manono]

Yes, after you crop away what you want, then you add in a resize filter to resize it back to the way it was originally, or to any other resolution you might like. If you don't know about resizers, then you'll probably want to use the Lanczos Resizer. AviSynth can do the same thing, quite easily:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Crop
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/LanczosResize