Hi Mirsad,

Easiest is probably to use a suitable mask to give right and left borders. There's a few posts on masks in the PD8 and PD7 forums.

Alternatively, you could produce that part of your video and use 3rd party software to crop it and bring it back in to your project.

Cheers
Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Quote: Hi Mirsad,

Easiest is probably to use a suitable mask to give right and left borders. There's a few posts on masks in the PD8 and PD7 forums.

Alternatively, you could produce that part of your video and use 3rd party software to crop it and bring it back in to your project.

Cheers
Adrian

O.K so I can't just use the crop function to do what I want or? Can you just point me in right direction with a link to this "mask" option possibly? Also, would be grat if you could recommend a software (freeware or shareware dosen't matter) to do what I am asking for? Thanks alot.

Try this link.

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/jforum.page?module=search&action=search&clean=1&search_keywords=mask&search_terms=all&search_forum=52&sort_by=time&sort_dir=DESC&search_cat=

Depending on your video formats there is Pazera and Super©, I'm sure there are others out there as well.

If you join seemyworldonvideo.com there's lots of other tools for editors on the extras pages.

Cheers
Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Hi Misrad,

If using the Video Crop tool gives you the proper cropping that you require, but it's only the zooming in and out that is the problem, you do have the option to set the Key Frames so that your Crop maintains it's position without the zooming in and out.

- Open Cropping Video window > manually set Crop size > position the Crop with the blue diamond
- At the start/stop controls, you will see the Key Frame icons (diamonds)
- Slide the scrubber (or whatever you call it) to the right about an inch
- Click on the double diamond with the plus sign icon, and choose Duplicate Previous Key Frame from the drop down menu
- Once the duplicate Key Frame is created, slide that Key Frame all the way to the right.
(till it appears to be under the last yellow diamond on the right)

Now upon playback, your Crop’s position and size, will remain constant for the whole duration of your clip. The setting of Key frames allows you to choose when and if a zoom in/out occurs.

Or... do some pre-production.

- Open a new project and put the clips you wish to Crop, into a PIP track.
- Open PIP Designer > (you may want to uncheck Maintain Aspect Ratio)
- Click on Toggle icon (above Cancel button) > uncheck Snap To Reference
- Size your clip to suit, by extending the unwanted portions outside the viewing pane/area
- Produce to the same format that you will be using to Produce your final production in (e.g. Mpeg2, Avi, Wmv, etc), and save and name this pre-produced file as "Cropped Bits Mpeg2" (?)
- Import "Cropped Bits Mpeg2" to main project.

I've used both these workaround options, and though they are not always a perfect solution, they do both work in a pinch.

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Welcome to Cranston's Video Manipulation Clinic!

There you go - some excellent advice from Adrian (especially about using the Search function in the forum) & Cranston, on which I couldn't possibly improve.

Cheers - Tony
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I ran into the same problem a couple days ago and tried to find a solution. To crop just the left and right sides, I added another PiP track, then placed a black colorboard on PiP #1 and another on PiP #2 and resized and moved them to clip the sides. You can also make the black colorboards full size and use one of the PiP masks in the PiP Designer to crop the left and right sides.

In another situation I also wanted to crop without zooming and used Cranston's method. Then I discovered that you can just go to the last keyframe, set the crop size, then right-click and duplicate to "previous frames." Since the aspect ratio is maintained with the Crop power tool, you cannot crop just the left/right or the top/bottom.

Another way......

Just take a jpeg of blackness. A picture taken in a dark room with no flash.

And put it in the video to cover parts.


In other words just put a picture of black into the video and stretch it to create a border on one or more of the sides.

Hi Xerox,

Yea, I thought about including that... duplicate to "previous" frame maneuver as quick fix tip. But I wanted to point to those who have maybe not explored the Key Frames yet, that it's no big deal to add, delete, and manipulate Key Frames in order to have more options and control over the Video Crop tool, as well as in PIP Motion.

But yes, I wish that in the next PD8 update patch, that Cyberlink would include in Video Crop, a "maintain aspect ratio", that one could un-check (just as in PIP Designer), so we could size our Crop(s) to any dimensions we desire.

That sure would beat masking out the sides of a video with blackness, so one's video doesn't goes back and forth between filling the screen in all it's glory, and having those black sidebars pop in and out on playback.

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