Tool to aid in crop+resize

[Quaraxkad]

I do most of my encoding in Mencoder, command line. When I need to crop, in the past I've loaded the video in VirtualDubMod and used its filters to determine the exact crop dimensions. Then I use that information in Mencoder (crop=w:h:y). I try to be as exact as possible, and sometimes getting the exact numbers in the VirtualDubMod filter can be difficult for some videos. Is there another tool that has a better GUI to aid in cropping a video? Something that can lighten a dark video, or even zoom in on an edge would be extremely useful.

Another useful feature would be a calculator that suggests WxH values for certain aspect ratios that are multiples of 8 or 16.

Is there a tool that has these features?

[Baldrick]

I used to use fitcd to calculate the width, height, cropping, etc.

[manono]

Is there another tool that has a better GUI to aid in cropping a video?
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Another useful feature would be a calculator that suggests WxH values for certain aspect ratios that are multiples of 8 or 16.

Is there a tool that has these features?

I use the basic Gordian Knot for those things. With a DVD source make the D2V file in DGIndex and open that in GKnot. Then in the Resolution Tab you first set the PAR and then you can crop with the actual video as a guide, and it also has a resizer which you can set for whatever multiples you like for both the height and width. W=Mod32 and H=Mod16 are the defaults but they're easily changed. It also shows the Aspect Error so you can do additional cropping to bring down the error, and in the Options Tab you can set it to resize using the ITU Standard or not. It's quite good at what it does.

With some other source besides DVD you make a basic AviSynth script to open in GKnot. It may not be ideal when the source is something besides a DVD, but for DVD sources it's nearly perfect.

[Quaraxkad]

I used to use fitcd to calculate the width, height, cropping, etc.

I have used FitCD before, but it's not quiet what I'm looking for here.

[Quaraxkad]

I use the basic Gordian Knot for those things. With a DVD source make the D2V file in DGIndex and open that in GKnot. Then in the Resolution Tab you first set the PAR and then you can crop with the actual video as a guide, and it also has a resizer which you can set for whatever multiples you like for both the height and width. W=Mod32 and H=Mod16 are the defaults but they're easily changed. It also shows the Aspect Error so you can do additional cropping to bring down the error, and in the Options Tab you can set it to resize using the ITU Standard or not. It's quite good at what it does.

With some other source besides DVD you make a basic AviSynth script to open in GKnot. It may not be ideal when the source is something besides a DVD, but for DVD sources it's nearly perfect.

The videos I'm working with come from various sources, not often DVDs. They are usually poorly encoded videos I download and want to fix for storage. Even for DVDs though, that seems like a lot more work than calculating the crops in VirtualDub.

I just remembered a tool I used to use called Aspect, but it doesn't seem to support high resolutions (over 1024). The resizing part is no big deal, my main issue is a better tool for GUI cropping. I am a programmer myself, I could write my own tool for it but I'm unsure about the best way to import video frames onto the interface. I've never worked with video in my programs before.