«Project Crop» feature

Suggestion
1

When someone needs to export a cropped section of a clip (or entire project), the process is not very intuitive. It involves several steps that are not obvious to a new user.
Many will think that using the Crop: Rectangle filter will do the trick. Others will think that it will work by changing the Resolution settings in the Export panel. This comes up quite often on the forum, including a few times in the last couple of weeks.

So I wonder if it would be possible to add some sort of Project Crop feature in Shotcut.

I thought of 2 possible ways this feature could work. But of course, maybe there are simpler ones that I don’t see.

  • METHOD 1:
    Using a Crop: Rectangle filter on Output, then select From: Cropped Area in the Export panel.
    After clicking on Cropped Area, Shotcut would export only the area selected by the Crop filter.
    This is not an ideal solution though since this method would still be kind of hidden.
    Here’s a simulation:

  • METHOD 2
    Add a Project Crop button to the Preview toolbar. Clicking on that button would open a Project Crop panel where you could manually type the position and dimensions of the cropped area. You could also use the rectangle control in the preview window. After clicking the Apply button, Shotcut would use the panel’s position and dimensions to update the values in the Export panel.
    Here’s a simulation:

2

Thank you for starting this discussion.

I think that this cropping use case is not a good fit for Shotcut because it is really a “clip” operation, not a “project” operation. Also, I would associate this use case with transcoding, and not necessarily editing.

Have you used the crop feature in Handbrake? This is a good description that I think fits the use case much better.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.2.0/advanced/resizing-video.html

Maybe we could integrate cropping into the “Convert…” feature. Users could perform all the cropping they want on clips and then pull them back into Shotcut if that is helpful for them.

But for the most part, maybe people should just use Handbrake for this specific use case.

3

True.

I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I would very rarely use this feature myself in Shotcut. I’m not a big fan of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Stories and other vertically oriented video platforms.
I only use Handbrakes to reduce the weight of a Shotcut exported video. With a couple of clicks I can quickly change a 16MB clip into a less-than 8MB clip that will be accepted by the forum. And without much quality loss. The 2 videos I uploaded above were respectively 12MB and 8.9MB before re-encoding them with HandBrake. 1.58MB and 2.42MB after reduction, and almost as sharp as the originals.

But I digress… back to the subject… I think it would be nice if, instead of using an outside app to crop a clip, people had an easy (and intuitive) way to do it in Shotcut. Integrating cropping into “Convert…” sounds interesting.