Need to do this but I don't know what it's called

Help/How To
#1

Let’s say I have a 5s video with resolution 1920x1080. In that video it shows someone walking from the left of the video and at the end he arrived at the right side of the video. Basically at the beginning he’s somewhere between the 0-384 horizontal pixel position, at the 1st second he’s between the 384-768 position, at 2nd second he’s between 768-1152 position, and so on. What I want to do is to focus on him only with a resolution of 540x1080 (yes, vertical). The other unfocused area will be just black bars. How do I go about achieving this?

Sorry I don’t even know what to search for when looking for sample video online to work on or even the name of the filters or what is it I’m trying to do is called (don’t think it’s motion tracking but I’m not sure). If anyone can help me find the tutorial of something remotely similar to what I’m trying to achieve that’ll be good enough. Thank you.

#2

Look for a filter like “Crop rectangle”. You can animate the cropping as you like and when you like. You can also try “size & position” to animate the zoom depending if you want to zoom in to a person when moving e.g. Another approach to focus on something would be to blur the surrounding and just focus on the person moving. For this you would copy the track, blur the lower track and use “size&pos” or “Crop rect.”) on the upper track. When you want to keep track with the person moving you have to constantly animate the parameters e.g. for “size & position” so that the filter always works on the object in focus.

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#3

As @RilosVideos said, you can use the available crop filters.

But from what I think, shotcut might not be the perfect program for the result you want to achieve, and Yes, it’s both technically and physically possible to get that result in shotcut, but that would be little bit time taking (If you want your video to follow the man too with cropping) otherwise you can create a custom project with 540x1080 with 0.5 aspect ratio, and simply adjust to right position.

I recommend either blender or hitfilm to do this if you are also wanting to follow the motion of man. As a basic idea, track the motion of the man’s middle body, choose the X and Y plane to track, and then apply the motion track to the video itself. Voila, it creates a stabilization. Now you can simply export and crop in the software you want.

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#4

This can all be done with Crop: Rectangle & Keyframes.

In my example, I used 2 tracks for ease of demonstration. The blue would be your black bars.
Example video:

Here is the MLT project file so you can see what the settings are.
croprex.mlt (4.6 KB)

If you need to zoom in while cropped, as @RilosVideos has stated, use the Size, Position @ Rotate filter. You will need to use Keyframes with this filter as well.

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#5

Note: If using the Crop: Rectangle filter, use the current beta version of Shotcut, or any version after 22.01.30. A bug was fixed for the current version.

At the time of this post, only the beta version exists with the bug fix.

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#6

You beat me to it. Here is my video showing the keyframing of the Crop Rectangle filter ( Example video by DIEGO COBENA from Pexels) Shotcut Version 22.01.30:

If you want to, you can also keyframe the height as well as the width.

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#7

Although you can’t alter the values via the spinboxes, or by typing in the values in version 22.01.30, you can still use the VUI (Visual User Interface) and drag the borders to set the values. In fact in my opinion this is the easiest way to achieve what the OP wants.

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#8

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