Crop video without losing quality?

[DeeEff]

Howdy, fellow Corel fans -

I bought VSX5 Ultimate last week to go with my new GoPro Hero2, climbed the learning curve, and can now produce presentable videos. I've read the (not very complete) VS User Guide, checked Corel's Knowledgebase, spent the better part of thirty hours twiddling filters (rendering to a 1280x720 output file and viewing that outside of VS) and spent about eight hours searching this forum and the Interweb for the answer to no avail, so here I am:

I have 1920x1080 30p MP4 video from the camera, but want to crop it to 1280x720, and not lose image quality. Can VSX5 do this, and/or how?

I'm new to video, but very old to photography. When I say "crop" I mean "throw away the area outside of my cropping rectangle, resulting in an image of smaller dimensions."

I do not mean "fill the area outside my cropping rectangle with the color of my choice, resulting in an image of the same dimensions" as happens when using the Crop Borders filter.

Video Pan & Zoom doesn't work as the final results are abominable; as soon as I specify 150% zoom (amount needed to make a 1280x720 area fill a 1920x1080 area) quality is lost. The Cropping filter produces the same (lost) quality results. Distort Clip does the best job but still suffers some image quality degradation, and it's nearly impossible to get a precise "150%" crop (or "33% reduction" as my Photoshop brain thinks) as dragging the handles is all by eyeball. I think the problem is that all of these options entail two steps: (1) Enlarging the area I want to keep, causing it to fill the frame -- AND losing quality in the interpolation process. (2) Saving the entire frame (clip), now filled with lower-quality "larger pixels" so to speak, at a smaller size than original.

My Project Properties are NTSC drop frame (29.97fps), AVI, 24bits, 1920x1080, 29.97fps, Frame-based, Uncompressed, PCM, 48kHz, 16bit stereo.
My Movie Template that I'm using is MPEG-4, 24 bits, 1280x720, 29.97fps, Frame-based, H.264 High Profile Video: 12500 Kbps, 48000Hz, 16bit, Stereo, MPEG AAC Audio: 128Kbps.

Am I trying to do something that can't be done? Am I overcomplicating something? Am I missing the "photographic crop" filter?

Thank you for any/all help!
-Dee

[Ken Berry]

Your definition of crop is correct. But I don't think you need to crop your original video in that sense. If you have a movie template with the properties you list, then that is all you need. Once you have finished editing, you simply go to Share > Create Video File and then choose that template. Video Studio will then automatically reduce the frame size from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 and use the other properties you are after. No video will be cut off it at all -- just the whole frame squeezed down to the smaller size...

Or have I missed the point? Do you really want to cut some of the video off the edges of the frames? Or do you -- as I am assuming -- just want to reduce the 'big' video frame to the smaller size? Or to put it in still photographic terms, do you just want to reduce a photo which would fit very comfortably on a 12 x 8 inch sheet of paper down to fit on a 6 x 4 inch paper without actually cutting any of the edges off?

[DeeEff]

Do you really want to cut some of the video off the edges of the frames? Or do you -- as I am assuming -- just want to reduce the 'big' video frame to the smaller size? Or to put it in still photographic terms, do you just want to reduce a photo which would fit very comfortably on a 12 x 8 inch sheet of paper down to fit on a 6 x 4 inch paper without actually cutting any of the edges off?

Yes, to your first question above. In photography it's just the crop - no resize, no resampling, no pixel remapping - I want to lose the outside "frame" of content.

(Sorry for being confusing...
-Dee

[Howarda401]

I'm afraid that if you are attempting what I beleive you are attempting it is not possable.

You are trying to crop away a significant amount of the outside edges of the video while retaining the original quality of the original footage. Your problem excists any time you zoom in or crop during post production. The program can only use the information in the original footage. In cases of zooming in or cropping the necessary graphic details are not available from the original footage. Even using the anti-shake filters causes a loss of quality as it crops some of the outer edge of the picture.

I'm sorry I'm not telling you anything you probably want to hear. The only way to maintain video quality when zooming or cropping in a video is to do it with the camera during pre-production. Preferably with a tripod.