Cropping Video

I would like to crop a video in a pip track. I did some searching on the Power Director forums & found that only for v6, you'd have to expand the video off the screen, produce it, & then import it back into the pip track. But since I have v7, I thought there might be a more convenient way.

So is there a convenient way to crop video in Power Director 7?

Yes it possible to crop the video.
1. Insert the clip in overlay track
2. Click trim ( It is the 3rd menu above the time line )
3. Trim window will open
4. Move the trimming sliders as desired.
5. Click okay

Hmm... I just tried it & I couldn't find anything to crop the video. It seams like trimming is only meant for taking sections of a clip out. When I said "cropping" I meant, like, cutting out 1 person from a group of people.

Me myself & Pi
It is nessacery that you are unambigous in your choice of words.
The word cropping is generally understood as the process which I described in my last post. Cropping = Trimming

In your last post you meant something else

You can "cut" out a person in PD 7, but rather clumsily.

1. Use the blur special effect
OR
2. Use a white colour board in the video over lay and resize the board to the height and width of the person in case the video clip lies in maintrack.

Yeah, I know I could use those possibilities. But it would be nice to crop off the video & have it centered automatically.

What I really want to do here is take a video & crop it down to just the action & to put it in front of another video as a pip (just resizing the video would make it to small). But it's fine to just expand the video so that the parts I don't want are off screen & then to just produce the video & import it back in.

Try using Chroma keying if the back ground is more or less of uniform colour

Cropping means to cut the boarder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cropping

Use the zoom tool and go into edit effect. Move the sliders to get rid of unwanted material towards the edges of the picture.

Chris,

Using your technique, I was able to crop only the main movie track, not the PiP tracks. Additionally, the focal point seems to be the CENTER of the screen, and is unchangeable.

So using this tecnique, I'd have to put my PiP track as the main track, use the Zoom effect to simulate cropping, produce and reimport into my actual project?

Any ideas on what to do about the focal point.... i.e. is there a way to zoom towards the left side of the movie, instead of the center?

Thanks!

Sorry,

I am at a loss. Maybe someone else could assist as I do no know how to zoom to a particular point.

I can only imagine that whatever technique you use a loss of quality in the final product is inevitable as you are going to spread pixels over a larger area

I think it is not possible at this time to cropp a video-clip. For pictures use the function magic motion in the main-track.

Cropping in the sense of zooming and panning, I gather is supposed to be in the magic motion tool, but for me this tool always greyed out..
What are the conditions under which it can be used?
(Power Director V7)
Nita

Magic motion is only for pictures and only if the picture is in the main-track

OK,
To clarify by 'picture' you mean still?
What is the 'main track'..the 'master video track'?

So this means there is no method for changing zoom or view position in a movie?

Nita

I mean the first track and not a overlay track - sorry, I am german.

Cropping means cutting the boarder in different ways.

You can zoom a vidoe. Put it in an overlay-track and use the bib-designer. You can zom in and out and you can strech in different ways but you can not delete a part of - for exampel - the right boarder of a movie. You must use a mask, but is is not flexible.