How to use the crop filter to remove black borders?

[MickeyKnox]

The crop filter seems simple enough, but it just doesn’t work for me. I would expect that after applying the crop filter, that the preview would also change. But it doesn’t.

When I manually adjust the resolution in export, instead off the top and bottom border being removed, as I instructed the crop filter, new left and right black borders are added. Whut?

So, how to use the crop filter to remove black borders?

Oh, I found this answer, which seems to address the problem:

Export Resolution same as cropped, source video

Wow! You are correct. This surprised even me. Nice find. The steps involving Playlist and Timeline somewhat complicate the story, but it can be used for more advanced scenarios. Many users simply want to do this for a single clip: start with no project open a clip add video filter Crop: Source optionally add other filters and trim as needed choose Settings > Video Mode > Automatic click Export (At this point you can see the Video > Resolution in advanced mode has adopted the new resolution.…

It doesn’t work though. I don’t witness a new export resolution being applied after adding the crop filter.

[shotcut]

That linked thread is old. Old info is not often updated, especially when it is not the documentation and there are multiple threads. The reply you linked was a workaround that was not a supported feature and was broken for a more important, supported feature. A new feature to provide a proper solution will be in the next version 23.11 due in a few days.

[shotcut]

@MickeyKnox

Whut?

Shotcut is a video editor and not dedicated crop tool. Video editing usually involves multiple items. In that context it is a bad idea to automatically change the canvas (output) size based on the crop of one item because the crop for item A should not be automatically be applied to item B. As a result, item B’s aspect ratio would no longer match the canvas and black bars will be added to it. Also, crop can be used in different ways for different reasons in a multi-item video composition. Maybe the video you want to crop is overlaid atop another video. Maybe you really do want to add black bars after removing some bad edges to output in a standard aspect ratio.

[MickeyKnox]

I understand that working with different videos with different resolutions and different aspect ratios can become a nightmare.

However, I usually just work with single videos, that I cut together a bit. For this simple use case, can I expect the crop filter to work just fine in the coming version?

If not, can you recommend a tool to crop the video? The only one I have used so far is avidemux. I’m also worried about degrading video quality, if I use a bunch of different tools, each encoding the video anew. That’s why I would prefer to do everything with one single tool and one single encoding process.