Trying to help a friend remove black bars

[Angriff]

Sorry I did search and found some answers to no avail, tried vidcoder, avidemux, filmora, etc, but none of these have worked. Been working on this for hours now. I'm trying to completely remove these black bars without stretching the video (at this point I can't even remove them with stretching) if its even possible at all. From everything I've read the only thing you can do is blur the bars to a different filter or something? Is there no way to resize the whole video into a different aspect ratio or something? I've mostly been trying different cropping features, but none of them seem to do anything to the bars. She filmed it horizontally with an iphone so I have no idea why I'm seeing the bars to begin with, she says when she goes fullscreen on her device it shows no bars, but I'm assuming thats because its an apple product. She gave me permission to post the video if necessary, any help would be greatly appreciated. It's for her new business so I think she wants to put it on facebook or something.

[koberulz]

Your post is pretty damn long considering it provides almost no actual information.

What are you viewing the video on? How does it actually look? Give us a sample. We have no idea what you're seeing, what you're trying to do, what steps you've already tried, or why they didn't achieve what you wanted.

[Angriff]

Your post is pretty damn long considering it provides almost no actual information.

What are you viewing the video on? How does it actually look? Give us a sample. We have no idea what you're seeing, what you're trying to do, what steps you've already tried, or why they didn't achieve what you wanted.

Sorry man, I'm don't do video editing so I'm completely new, it was long because I thought I was giving the pertinent information but I guess not. I'll attach it since you asked for a preview, I didn't know if that was allowed.

[DB83]

It would help if you stated where the bars are - top and bottom = letterbox or left and right = pillarbox.


But the bars might be created at playback and not hard-coded in to the video. Then, whatever you do, if the video is not in proportion to the display you end up with bars. The only way then to remove them without stretching is to crop some of the edges and the owner will probably not like that.


But you had better post the video if the owner had given permission or at the very least download mediaifo and provide a text-mode report of it.

[Angriff]

It would help if you stated where the bars are - top and bottom = letterbox or left and right = pillarbox.


But the bars might be created at playback and not hard-coded in to the video. Then, whatever you do, if the video is not in proportion to the display you end up with bars. The only way then to remove them without stretching is to crop some of the edges and the owner will probably not like that.


But you had better post the video if the owner had given permission or at the very least download mediaifo and provide a text-mode report of it.

Posted in a previous reply, they are left and right, so pillarbox I guess, and they are like half the size of the screen lol. If it's something that can only be fixed with paid software I'd be willing to paypal someone to fix it for a reasonable price.

[DB83]

As I stated, the bars are hard-coded unless this is not the original video.


Nothing you can do with that. And it's a shame because it is a nice presentation. But it would be better to re-shoot it with the phone/camera in the horizontal.

[Angriff]

As I stated, the bars are hard-coded unless this is not the original video.


Nothing you can do with that. And it's a shame because it is a nice presentation. But it would be better to re-shoot it with the phone/camera in the horizontal.

Ah damn ok thanks so much for taking a look man. For my own knowledge, how can you tell that they are hard coded in case I come across this in the future? And any idea why it has the bars even though it was shot in the horizontal from what she told me? I read something about it being related to iphones when I was researching this.

[koberulz]

If that plays fine on an iPhone, Apple is doing something wacky with it.

[DB83]

If it was shot in the horizontal then the iphone screwed it up.


The video is IIRC 960 pixels by 540 pixels. But the horizontal width of the live footage is less, significantly less, than 960 pixels hence the hard-coded pillar-boxing.


Cropping, as I stated, is easy but the bars will return as soft-coded.


And while you could crop and place a blur background that will probably detract from the presentation.

[DB83]

I do not own an iphone but I guess that it sees the bars as soft-coded and ignores them on direct playback. Not possible on Windows devices.

[Angriff]

Awesome, thanks so much for the help guys, I really appreciate it!

[DB83]

The other possibility is that the video really was shot in the vertical and the bars were added when the video was transferred to a computer to allow for a correct aspect-ratio.


One often sees this with 'selfie' vids. In this scenario it may be possible to re-transfer the video but not as 16:9 but as 4:3 which then results in narrower bars. You can also do that yourself by cropping 120 pixels left and right. The only issue then is you re-encode the video so lose some quality.


This business looks quite classy and presenting a commercial in this manner really does 'cheapen' it. A lot of money appears to have been spent on the restaurant so really the commercial should echo that.

[ProWo]

You can crop the black borders with my smart FFMpeg gui https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/395425-New-small-GUI-for-FFmpeg

Modify video track, select as source file your IMG_5504.mov (select all files first, to the right bottom), target file is automatically selected, next, yes without crop detect, next, (on the next screen set all like picture).

Do it, after the reencoding has finished click Main to return to the main screen.
Click on Multiplex and set all like picture, do it. The IMG_5504-new_tmp-muxed.mkv is your result.

[Cornucopia]

No way that was shot horizontal.

Plus, it's level 3.1, 30fps (not 29.97), BT709 when it's SD (960x540 ain't HD!), number of other things suggest it was edited in iMovie and exported at this lower rez WITH the bars.

Time to rework.

Scott

[jagabo]

Yes, you would be better going back to the original source video(s). But you can easily remove the "black" bars. Pretty much every video editor lets you crop away parts of the frame. Of course, you'll be left with a tall, skinny video. Note that the border width varies from shot to shot. I cropped to a size that completely removed the widest of them

[jagabo]

Actually, almost every video editor and many video converters allows you to crop the video frame size to remove the black bars. But to keep a 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio, sometimes you need crop out a little bit of the edge of the video.

A little bit? After removing the existing black borders the video is 332x540. Cropping that down to 16:9 would leave you with only 332x186 -- you'd be losing 2/3 of the picture, not a "little bit". The remaining video would be useless.