How can I crop a video?
How does one remove a black border around a video. The input video has the size 720x576 and has the output video should be 720x480. I need to crop away 96 pixels from top and bottom.
I have gazed through this list of video tools for Mac, but I'm unsure which tools can do this. I have tried MPEG Streamclip and avidemux2, but they doesn't seem capable of it.
Preferable a free tool.
Handbrake is the way to go here, as mentioned by roguesys and canary_in_the_data_mine in the accepted answer.
I am using Catalina. MPEG Streamclip does not support this version of OSX, and iMovie's cropping tool is married to the 16:9 aspect ratio.
As soon as you open your clip, if it has black bars (which was my case), handbrake will crop them automatically and it will show you in its summary how the converted video will look like.
You can tweak out things in the other tabs (dimensions where you can do a fine tune of the cropping, video for the compression codec and other things, filters, audio, etc).
Once you're satisfied with the settings in the summary, go to the bottom of the App window, choose the folder where you will save the video, and press the green Start button at the top.
If you are using MacBook or iMac the best app is iMovie.
- Create new project in iMovie
- Import video to iMovie and then drag and drop it in your new project
- Select you video in project and use crop button in preview window
- Export your new video and use it
If it is a large file that you need a small part of then first trim the video by pressing command+t when the file is opened in quicktime. Import time to iMovie will decrease by a lot
You can do this on the command line using ffmpeg and the crop filter. Handbrake is a great tool, however it uses the same ffmpeg libraries that you can use directly from the command line.
The basic command is as follows:
% ffmpeg -i input_filename -filter:v "crop=w:h:x:y" output_filename
-
w= width of the output video -
h= height of the output video -
x:y= coordinate of the top left corner of the crop box (0,0 is bottom left)
Your specific example, since you want to remove just the top and bottom, you will crop using the center point and just specify the size of the crop box:
% ffmpeg -i input_filename -filter:v "crop=720:480" output_filename
Using some examples from the ffmpeg page
Crop area 100x100px starting at coordinate (12,34)
% ffmpeg -i input_filename -filter:v "crop=100:100:12:34" output_filename
Same as above, but using the named options
% ffmpeg -i input_filename -filter:v "crop=w=100:h=100:x=12:y=34" output_filename
Crop an area 100x100px from the center point
% ffmpeg -i input_filename -filter:v "crop=100:100" output_filename