Cropping WMVs?

[MS]

What ways are there to crop a WMV?

I couldn't find any way to do it in Windows Movie Maker.

I did see one way to do it with Windows Media Encoder. You had to specify
how many pixels to crop from each side. However, I didn't see any way to
actually see a frame from the movie, and drag the sides to crop it visually.
Is there a way to do that?

After cropping, will it save without re-encoding?

Also, how about autocrop? Many encoding programs have that, but I didn't see
it in WMM or WME. For instance, there are many videos that are actually
wide-screen movies. However, the stated aspect is 4.3, and black bars
actually get encoded into the movie, a total waste of file space. Better to
crop off the black bars and only actually encode the actual movie, not the
black bars. There are programs that will sense those black bars and crop
them off automatically before encoding. Any way to get WMM or WME to do
that?

Another nice automatic cropping feature (although I haven't seen this in
many programs) would be to be able to automatically re-format a wide-screen
(16:9 or other wide format) to 4:3. This of course, would be to first do the
autocropping mentioned in the previous paragraph if necessary, then crop the
sides equally to change the AR to a real 4:3, without the black bars. (I
know many would be aghast at this, considering reformatting wide screen to
4:3 to be sacrilege, but it would be nice to have the option of doing that
automatically, for those who prefer full screen.) (Watching a video on a
Pocket PC, for example, the 320x240 screen is so small to start with, one
might really prefer to fill the screen, even if they miss something cropped
off the sides, rather than having black bars at top and bottom.)

 

[Rehan]

What ways are there to crop a WMV?
I couldn't find any way to do it in Windows Movie Maker.

However many you like! If you note that in a movie environment cropping is
essentially the same as zooming into the frame so that the corners go out of
the visible frame while maintaining the frame size. For still images, the
act of cropping may produce a resized image and it may be justifiable but
not for movie whose final size is generally fixed.

So if this is acceptable, then note that there is a "Ease In" effect in WMM
which continuously zooms into the frame. This may not be useful as it is,
but you can use it to create a custom effect with your own parameters to
achieve a static zoom.

I did see one way to do it with Windows Media Encoder. You had to specify
how many pixels to crop from each side. However, I didn't see any way to
actually see a frame from the movie, and drag the sides to crop it
visually.
Is there a way to do that?

WMM does not work this way. It uses Effects and Transitions with constant
parameters. This is presumably designed for ease of use.... just drag and
drop... but yes it restricts advanced functionality for effects and
transitions.

Nevertheless you can capture a frame in WMM and open it in your image editor
to find out how much to crop from each side. Find out how much the rest is
as a ratio of te full frame and use this value in your custom zoom effect.

Here is the xml code for a "Static Zoom In 5%" effect:

<TransitionsAndEffects Version="1.0">
<Effects>
<EffectDLL guid="{B4DC8DD9-2CC1-4081-9B2B-20D7030234EF}">
<Effect name="Static Zoom In 5%" iconid="33">
<Param name="InternalName" value="Simple3D" />
<Param name="StartScaleA" value="0.95" />
<Param name="ScaleA" value="0.95" />
</Effect>
</EffectDLL>
</Effects>
</TransitionsAndEffects>

Instructions: Open Notpad and copy paste this code into it. Save as
"crop.xml" in "C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX". Create this
folder if not already there. Restart WMM.

If you want to crop only from one or two of the sides, or if you want a
higher quality zoom effect you may be ineterested to try my Pan Zoom effects
package (http://www.rehanfx.org/panzoom.htm) which allows you full control
over zoom parameters with the only limitation that it will preserve the
aspect ratio. It excells in preserving maximum output quality possible.

After cropping, will it save without re-encoding?

No. It will reencode always.

Another nice automatic cropping feature [... snip ... ]

You are asking for a PanScan zoom ? The above method is actually about doing
this statically. All you need is to specify the zoom amount: From ratio 6:9
to 4:3 which is 0.75

This obviously does a static zoom, the panscan feature in dvd movies has the
ability to code the information about focus of action in the movie so that a
dvd player can automatically pan towards that direction.

To do any intelligent panning while detecting the action automatically is
also possible in Movie Maker but would definitely require writing a custom
effects plugin. For more information about writing Cusotm effects and
transitions plugins for Movie Maker consult this article:

Creating Custom Effects and Transitions in Windows Movie Maker
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/moviemakersfx.asp?_r=1>

 

[Manila Dell \(MSUN\)]

To visually crop it, you can use DVD2AVIdg. Here is a relevent page for this
procedure. http://www.microsoftusernetwork.com/mcored/04-extractingac3.htm

 

[prodia]

Hi all,

It has been 4-5years and there is still no cropping applet provided in WMM.
True edits still have to be carried out in a linux environment or some nasty
third party app. Recently, I had the need to crop. DV->cropped MPEG in
linux->WMV in vista adds black bars in 16:9 and stretches automatically in
4:3. Access to the full encoder options would be greatly appreciated for
Adminstrators. A cropping preroll out app has been due and is even more
usefull with handhelds.

cheers,
patrick