Hi Hemant -

You'll need to crop the video first - as shown here http://youtu.be/qLZUyFsNqEc

Then - produce to 1280x720. Job done.

Cheers - Tony

EDIT Sorry - forgot to mention the quality issue. The more you crop off the edges, the more quality you lose... but producing to 1280x720 from a 1920x1080 original will "disguise" the loss.
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Hi Tony

Thanks for the reply.

Your suggestion will introduce some zooming/scaling, which I wish to avoid as it would unnecessarily degrade the quality of the output.

Can the size of the crop window be set manually? Or is there any other way to crop out the borders (top, left, bottom, right) as seen in most free/shareware video editors?

Hi again -

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

Do you need to crop (cut off) anything from the edges of the video? If yes, then setting the first & last keyframes the same will result in a consistent crop with no zooming in.

In PD, the size of the crop window cannot be preset. The only thing that is preset is the proportions - i.e. 16:9.

If you're only cropping off a small edge, you won't see much quality loss.

Another possibility is to mask the edges or use an overlay.

... most free/shareware video editors?

I can't remember seeing one that will do that.

Cheers - Tony
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Quote: I can't remember seeing one that will do that.

Take VirtualDub or Avidemux, for example. The Crop filter allows me to manually set the offset (from the edges) in pixels to cut out. So, if I set the following values (left: 320, top: 180, right: 320, bottom: 180) and set the output video resolution to 1280x720, no zooming is introduced. I would have done it this way, except that I will have to save and re-import the clips in PD10... again quality loss.

I will investigate & compare output. There may be little or no difference.
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Quote: There may be little or no difference.

Yes, the difference is marginal. The video in question is of a stage performance by a group of children, recorded while sitting in the audience at 1920x1080 resolution. The sides of the stage and bobbing heads of other members of the audience are visible, which I wish to cut out by cropping to 1280x720 (this is the target resolution.)

If I use VirtualDub to crop the video as described earlier, the resulting video shows almost the same level of details (eg. on a 1280x720 screen, the facial features on the children's faces are almost as detailed as when watching the original video zoomed in to 1:1)

But using the Video Crop tool in PD10, a slight zoom gets introduced, and the resulting video looks marginally blurry on the 1280x720 screen. The facial features do not look as sharp as in the above case.

Would it be possible to frame-serve the cropped video from VirtualDub into PD10?

Thanks again for your help.

Haven't had a chance to make any comparisons, but obviously what you're seeing is what you're seeing. Any editor would go with the best result they can get!

You've got me with "frame serve", but you could easily import your cropped video from VD & carry on with your editing. Is that what you mean?

Of course - you'll produce to 1280x720 (or lower). Doing so at 1080p would get not-so-great results.

Cheers - Tony

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Quote: You've got me with "frame serve"

VD offers the ability to directly stream its video/audio to a standalone video encoder so you don't need to create a temporary video file. This is called frameserving. More info here:

http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_frameserver.html

To the video encoder, it looks like any other .avi file, but in reality, the .avi is just a shortcut to the video stream from VD.

Frameserving does not work with PD, but I was able to save the VirtualDub output in to an intermediate "lossless" format, and re-import into PD.

I hope the developers introduce this feature soon - cropping borders by specifying the number of pixels to cut from the edges.

Hi, sorry to drag up an old post, but I would like to do the exact same thing with PD13.

I have recorded at 1080p and wish to produce at 720p with no loss of resolution. Can I crop by a certain exact amount - i.e. 720/1080? I similarly do not want any degree of distortion in my output video because, as careful as I may be, I can never be exact as a computer can be with exact numbers typed in.

Thanks