Video Editor where I can select specific areas

I am looking for a Video Editor that I can use to select specific areas it different time frames. For example, in a video that is 1920x1080 let's say I want in the first minute to only show an area of 1024x768 located in an area of the total 1920x1080. Then after that I want to select another area in another part. The end result should show the video with only the selected areas.

This is because there is a lot of parts that do not correspond to what I want to show in the video.

I tried Pitivi, OpenShot and Avidemux. None have an option to select an area of the video.

Avconv/ffmpeg

Whenever we do not find an option to do a specific task we may find a command line tool more promising.

To achieve a video with clipped content from a time segment of our source we basically need the video filters trim, and crop from avconv/ffmpeg (whichever you prefer to use). Please read the documentation in the libav manual sections for all options.

Below example will produce a video from the first minute of our source with cropping a central area of 1024x768.

avconv -i <inputfile> -vf trim 0:60 crop=out_w=1024:out_h=768 <outputfile>

Cropping from another position than the center will need different parameters which can very nicely be fine-tuned (several examples are given in the libav documentatiton). Audio is not treated in this example. If your video contains audio you may have to trim the audio track as well.

The resulting clip will then have to be of course joined again with the orginal video which we will also have to trimm to the beginning, and the end of our transformed clip.

OpenShot

The crop feature is hidden in the clip's properties/layout settings. After we had selected an area (use the Razorblade too) of our clip we may select this sub-clip's properties with a right mouse click.

In the now opening menu choose the Layout tab to select an area to clip. Adjust height, width, and X, Y values until you are happy. A preview window will help doing so.

Below example uses a video with a constant view on the scene (as it is shown in the lower screen shot).

^{Enlarged to 200 % at the start of the clip}

^{Back to 100 % at the end of the clip}

Smooth transition

In the example above I started with a clipped region of the video at the beginning of my sample video fragment zoomed to 200% ("Start of Clip"). By undoing the enlagement at the end of my fragment to 100 % ("End of Clip") OpenShot will render a smooth transition between the two extremes (200% -> 100%) very much as if we had operated the camera zoom. With values for X or Y we can do the same resluting in an camera shift movement from the beginning to the end of the clip.

Static crop

In case we want a static clipped area only we just make the effect's value the same for the beginning and the end of the clip.

Details: OpenShot Manual