Cropping Video without changing aspect ratio

Eatsnax

Eatsnax

Well-known member
Okay I'm quite new to FCP. I have Studio 2. I have some clips in my video that I would like to make closer. Meaning I have the actor shot kind of far and would like to make him closer, or zoom it in. I find that the crop tool wont work with video only pics. And if I try to scale it, it ends up changing the aspect ratio. The video is shot in 720p. So when I'm working with it, it naturally has a letter box to it. When I try to zoom in, the letter box disapears. How do I zoom, pan and crop, with out changing the aspect ratio?:Drogar-Shock(DBG):
 
Tnere are a couple of ways to tackle this problem.

I encountered this recently, and used a Eureka #5 plugin "RT Widescreen" generator, but you can mimic the look pretty easily by doing the following:

1. Create a layered photoshop file where one layer has black bars at the top and bottom (at the letterbox aspect ratio you desire) and an alpha channel in the middle
2. Make all of your edits
3. Place the layer with the bars on a new track, above all of your edited tracks
4. Render, and done.

You could also do this by putting a black color matte on the top channel and using a mask to cut out a "letterbox" look. And there are probably several other ways to achieve this.
 
JJK said:
Tnere are a couple of ways to tackle this problem.

I encountered this recently, and used a Eureka #5 plugin "RT Widescreen" generator, but you can mimic the look pretty easily by doing the following:

1. Create a layered photoshop file where one layer has black bars at the top and bottom (at the letterbox aspect ratio you desire) and an alpha channel in the middle
2. Make all of your edits
3. Place the layer with the bars on a new track, above all of your edited tracks
4. Render, and done.

You could also do this by putting a black color matte on the top channel and using a mask to cut out a "letterbox" look. And there are probably several other ways to achieve this.
Click to expand...

Thanks I have thought about that too, and have used that tech in Sony Vegas, until I found out the proper way of doing it. It sounds to me like a good idea, but I'm sure there is a easier and proper way of doing it. I'll have to do that now but in the meantime I'm hoping to find out the real way of doing it.

I also, a long time ago, like a year, came across a tutorial that teaches you to crop and not loose resolution!! This was before I used FCP. It looked like it was achievable, and not that many steps, if anyone can chime in with a way to achieve either of these that would be great.

In the meantime, thanks for the reply, and I'll just do that.
 
I don't know how you can do it with out achieving resolution loss. Wouldn't it be easier to do a 'scale' and 'crop' in the motions tab? You could do a whole sequence by nesting it...


J
 
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