Sorry if this is very elementary, but after leaving VS for some years, I started dabbling in it again, and the got stuck at the first trivial thing I tried to do: crop the edges off some clips.
I select the clip in question, but there is NO Resize/Crop on the player panel as suggested at this link: https://www.videostudiopro.com/en/tips/ ... rop-video/
The aspect ratio and crop icons shown in Step 3 of that link are simply missing for me.
And selection Options > Attribute tab to choose the Cropping filter as suggested at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBh_2K-Qz0A
shows a completely empty filter list. All I can do is check the "Distort Clip" box, which dutifully lets me distort the clip, but of course that's not what I want.
It would seem that I have various plug-ins or options simply not activated or installed, but could not find any clues based on that hypothesis either. But I know the answer will be here.
Thanks tletter, it's not exactly what I want though. (I did figure out how to find the Cropping filter incidentally, though the Crop option on the Player Panel still does not show up--perhaps it's a feature of a post-X8 version.)
What I would like is to (1) crop arbitrarily (i.e., not to same ratio, which is what Zoom effectively does), (2) auto-zoom to the maximum size without distorting proportions or further cropping and (3) to letterbox any excess with horizontal or vertical black bands.
The Cropping filter let's me do (1), but then makes me choose between (2) or (3) using the "Fill Color" checkbox or not. If I use both Crop and Zoom filters, it seems I can get what I want but I'm operating in the dark since I can't seem to apply the second filter onto the output of the first filter to see visually what I'm doing.
Are you trying to re-size the video frame or trying to crop the video frame.
Try inserting the video to the overlay track, will show in preview screen as a smaller frame, we can drag the corners to resize and retain aspect ratio, reposition the video.
Right clicking the video in preview screen for anchor and resize options.
Have you tried using the picture in picture filter, maybe that will do what you want.
Video studio X8 is 6 or so years old as such may not have all the features showing in the tutorials that may be written for later versions
Customise Motion is a good tool which can resize your video, unsure If that was available with X8, I do not have that version installed
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Hi Trevor, I think I figured it out, using the Cropping filter + Video Zoom and Pan filter in that order. What I needed to do, by way of a simplified example, is to take my 1920x1080 clip, crop a 960x400 portion of it (note the height is <540 to remove unwanted things on the top and bottom, so it will be letter-boxed), and display it at full width (with black bands above and below, but not on the sides).
I was struggling to find a way to do it with the Cropping filter. It let's me crop, of course, but it only has two "expand" options: (1) don't expand, using the "Fill Color" option (so my video will have black all around it and will use just half the width of the video frame, which is not what I wanted); or (2) expand to the full video frame, unchecking "Fill Color" (so my video will be expanded to the full frame in BOTH dimensions, but stretched/distorted in the vertical dimension since my aspect ratio was not preserved in the crop. I was looking for a third option "Expand to the maximum while preserving aspect ratio and using letter-boxing as necessary" which sounds reasonable enough but I concluded didn't exist, not in X8 anyway.
But if I use Cropping to crop to 960x400 and then Zoom to 200% cascaded onto it, I get what I want. Unfortunately, I cannot see the Cropping filter applied when I'm applying the Zoom filter, so I have to imagine the letter-boxing when I'm adjusting the Zoom, but it's not hard to get used to it.
There may be an easier way to do that using the Chroma Key Mask Frames and then apply Customise motion to resize the frame.
But first you have to create a mask image similar to the one attached
1 / place video in overlay track
2 / Double click will open options panel for Mask and ChromaKey
3 / Apply Overlay options – Type Mask Frame
4 / Choose the add option and add the attached Black and White image.
5 / Apply Customise motion to resize to say 120 ish
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