easiest prog for cropping?

[paul714]

I apologize up front for my severe case of newbie-ness. I've only used Nero to make VCDs in the past but I have a few files that need some tweaking, namely cropping out some signal noise(or something) along the top and have a few questions-will cropping it out result in a stretched picture? If so can it be masked out instead? And of course, what would be the most newbie friendly program TMPGEnc, vDub, or something else? Thank you for any advice you might offer.
[img]http://photo.starblvd.net/~account71469/2-1-2.jpg?i=1034408974&pw=*36773D96EA17[/img]

[snowmoon]

TMPGenc under settings/advanced/clip frame.

Select Mask top and then adjust to taste, I recommend units of 8 pixels.

[banjazzer]

You can only crop if you re-encode, presuming you want to correct already created mpegs. The best answer is to use TMPG to encode to VCD from your original source, and use the clip frame function. To re-encode VCD mpeg will result in loss of quality.

[KingJohn]

I apologize up front for my severe case of newbie-ness. I've only used Nero to make VCDs in the past but I have a few files that need some tweaking, namely cropping out some signal noise(or something) along the top and have a few questions-will cropping it out result in a stretched picture? If so can it be masked out instead? And of course, what would be the most newbie friendly program TMPGEnc, vDub, or something else? Thank you for any advice you might offer.

Can you adjust your capture size to stop that ?

Using TMPGEnc as above, means you have to re-encode the video, and if you have already captured to mpeg 1, you might not want to do that

That is why people sometimes capture to AVI, they are a lot easier to work with later, Vdub can use a cropping (Filter) and remove bad frames, before the final conversion to mpeg 1 with TMPGEnc.

The problem is, if your capture is mpeg 1/2, you may have a few frames dropped without knowing it, start to edit these and you may get lip sync problems.

[paul714]

Thanks for your input guys, it is appreciated. I'll use TMPG to mask it rather that crop it as I had planned. KingJohn- I'll definately keep that in mind when I finally get a capture card, unfortunately I got these on CDR from a trade. Looks like it 's time to finally get over being intimidated by TMPG

[banjazzer]

You can't mask it until it's been cropped.

[paul714]

So I crop it and then use the mask to make up the difference, masking it won't just overlay the line in the video hiding it...I think I'm catching on(hopefully) Thanks again Banjazzer!

[banjazzer]

The cropping will get rid of the lines. I don't think masking will make much difference. It certainly doesn't appear to affect the aspect ratio. Although, you can have different coloured masks, if you want. 8)

[KingJohn]

It could make the picture go off center

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