It is a nice find but it looks like when you do it once you can’t undo it. If you want to try the cropping again it looks like you’d have to start a new project all over again unless I am missing something.
I’m probably missing a step, but I can’t make this work with 20.04.12.
I tried several times with and without adding a clip to the playlist.
Started with Automatic and 1080p 25fps and 1080 60fps video modes.
Basically, it’s this: If you load a clip into the playlist and choose Settings > Video Mode > Automatic then the Export settings will be reset to that clip’s resolution and fps. You can see test this by throwing in the playlist two clips of different resolutions and choosing Settings > Video Mode > Automatic for each clip. You will keep bouncing between both of those resolutions in the Export menu.
It does seem that this whole thing seems to get messed up if you add anything to the timeline. So the process must be kept in the Source and Playlist without adding anything in the timeline.
If you are only using Source and no playlist or timeline project, there is a bug that after you change video mode nothing with filters works again until you reload the clip. Basically, if you want to try more than once you need to start over from the beginning.
Workarounds for all the pitfalls are left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: copy and paste the filters.
That bug was fixed in version 20.09
My suggestion to make it a simpler task is to add a checkbox at the “Crop: Source” filter to “Set it as new View Mode” (just like we have the checkbox “Center” in that filter). Additionally, it would be a lot easier to crop black bars if the cropping bars had a strong color like green like the filter in Avidemux. P.S. I am not comparing the two open source softwares, both are great and serve different purposes, I am just using their crop filter to illustrate and make a suggestion.
1 Like
In version 20.09.13 Crop: Source was fixed for the more common usage of Cropping within a project when using proxy scale, and it broke this use case. However, this use case was never intended and only discovered by accident. We need to figure out a different way to support this use case.
2 Likes
I have also same situation and no find any solution, so please help us
1 Like
English is not my first language so sorry for any inaccuracy. Also, no idea about video editing. This is my first program trying to use for this.
I just want to open a video, select the part I want to actually use in the future from the video, crop that part (this means removing everything outside of the selection box) and then save that part with its new resolution according to the selected part, of course. Like you can do in paint with a picture, for example. Can I do that with shotcut program in a simple way?
When trying to crop a video in shotcut, the result is the selected part working normally but everything else (the non-cropped part) just black out. And if a export the video, the result is the same. I have a “cropped” video with the same resolution (??) and a smaller box (the actually cropped part) surrounded by black color spaces.
There are many different ways to accomplish what you are seeking. Many different ways to use filters.
If you have something specific, it might be best to start a help topic of your own and many others will help you accomplish what you wish to do with Shotcut.
I recently had the same misunderstanding of the Crop filter - and I have been speaking English for seven decades.
The Crop filter removes unwanted surrounding material, leaving the image the same size.
What you want requires, in most editors (such as The Gimp image editor, which I use) two steps:
- Crop Image
- Scale Image
In Shotcut, this can be done in one step, using the Size, Position, Rotate filter.
Using the SPR filter, It can even be done dynamically, using Keyframes.
There are two excellent tutorial videos on this filter.
and
For Crop:Rectangle and Crop:Circle, this is correct.
1 Like
Thanks for the replies. I couldn’t do it but I already waste the saturday trying to do this so it’s just time to move on. I can say shotcut was the closest program to help me with it. With other programs I couldn’t even get to the “trying to crop the part of the video you actually want” stage.
I clearly went with the wrong mindset, probably spoiled for doing it mindless with pictures in paintnet for years. Open pic, select, crop to selection, save and that’s it. I assumed, clearly wrong, that video should be the same. Open vid, select the actual part of the video you want (in my case, I just wanted the vertical square where a person is doing sign language in some news channels), crop that part, save it and move on. No idea why would I want only a part of the video visible and the rest… as black painted background? But I assume is some sort of effect. At the same time no idea why would I want to zoom-in to a part of the video unless, of course, I explicitely select a zoom related tool. Or why would I wanted to maintain the same resolution while selecting and cropping a smaller part inside a video? If the video is, let’s say, 1920x1080, and the part I selected is something like 260x450 (my ignorance makes me wonder if a resolution like that is possible in a video, I assume yes), I expected the new video to be at the resolution of the cropped part (260x450) and not catastrophically pixel-zoomed adapted at 1920x1080 resolution.
This is just beyond confusing for me and, clearly, I’m not gonna get it since it looks plain unnatural for me. In any case, thanks for the help regardless. I didn’t want to just delete my account without at least thanking the help to try overcome my clumsy attempts at this.
Shotcut is much more flexible than those clock-and-go picture editors; to achieve this flexibility, it gives the user many different controls which must be set to get whatever effect is desired.
To do what you have stated (which is very different from the usual use, but well within Shotcut’s capacity), you would first, before loading any video, set the video mode to the output size you have specified…
…then…
…and proceed onwards from there.
You can now zoom in to the part you want (what you have been describing is a zoom) and the output will be the same 260x450.
after step 5, you should add a step, in source mode, filter->size->to make picture fill the new canvas. then go to step 6.
1 Like
(just signed up, but using shotcut for this was very frustrating)
Wow after struggling for nearly an hour, I download Avidemux and even though I’ld never used it before I accomplished it in a minute. FWIW I’ve been using shotcut > 5 years off and on.
Not to through shade on the programmers, esp since noones getting paid. But it definitely could be improved
Thank you so much!
I edited a whole video with a “Crop: Rectangle” filter. I am trying to do pan and scan. There is a girl dancing in my video from the left to the right of the video. I am trying convert this video to portrait and keep the girl in frame the whole time by having the frame follow her around. I did this using keyframes. So I’m not needing just a stationary cropped part of the video exported, I’m needing a cropped part of the video that moves around.
Now I when I try to export it, my cropped section is just a tiny section inside the original sized video with black space filling the unused part of the video.
The workaround posted here was broken sometime back when preview scaling was added. It was never an intended solution. A proper, supported solution (including an interactive rectangle control) was added for the next version 23.11.
See Apply to Source in the Crop: Rectangle filter. Here are steps to crop a single video file: