I'm addressing two matters in this topic - a request and a helpful hint.

First, I'm looking for a good way to do a simple crop. On production switchers, we can mask or crop with the ability to adjust any edge (independently) right where we want it without resizing or repositioning. A good way to do this in PD has so far eluded me. Currently I'm using New Blue's garbage matte. That tool is great except that the ability to precisely positin the corners is woefully lacking. I need to adjust with pixel accuracy and bumping a red dot around is pretty tough!

Here's what's up: During a long shoot I discovered that I developed a couple bad pixels in my camera so I have two little dots in my video which I find distracting. Although the camera seems fine after a night, my footage isn't. So I'm using a trick borrowed from broadcast TV to do pixel compensation. I'll outline it here so you folks can do it too. It's really tough without simple cropping, but it does work.

Start a new project and import the clip you want to fix. Put a copy on track 2. Now put a color matte (like CK green) on track 1. Apply the New Blue garbage matte to the clip on track 2 (don't confuse this with placing it on an FX track). Now edit that effect. Click the "invert" box and you'll see a large green area. Now move the corners one at a time to reduce that green area to a single dot just to the left of the bad pixel. It helps to enable/disable the effect with the check box to the left so you can see how close you're getting. Once you have a dot the same size as the pixel(s) that you are trying to fix, uncheck the invert box. Now remove the green color background from track 1 and replace it with another copy of the clip to be fixed (but with no effects applied). Now select the clip on track 2 and go to the keyframe function. Scrub through the movie to a place where the bad pixel is most prominent then add ONE keyframe by adjusting the X position of the clip on track 2. You should be able to tick the X value up about 2 or 3 times to get the good spot on track 2 to cover the bad spot on track 1. You'll have to do this whole thing again on an additional track to fix any other pixels. Once done, produce a "fixed" video from from this project and use it in your remaining editing. Incidentally, broadcast cameras allow you to do this pixel compensation internally - that's where I got this idea in the first place.

So on a production switcher this is really easy to do because doing nice clean crops with precise control of each edge separately is very simple. Other NLE's can do this too because it's a really simple feature. But HOW can I do this in Power Director??? I don't mean to be so critical because PD is great for production when you want to get all the way to finished DVDs and Blu Rays - BUT it lacks the really simple features which are the building blocks to great tricks. What's not to like about simple-to-do PIPs and artistic effects? But if we don't ask for the basics (like keyers) we won't get them, will we?


Thank you guys so much for helping me try to find a better crop/mask function!