Why is cropping managed in this non-nonsensical way?

[gentleben]

Description of problem or question:

Unless I'm missing something, setting the crop dimensions should be easier and more intuitive. I have lots of videos that I need to encode but I need to heavily crop them all.

Automatic cropping doesn't work in this case (works fine generally but can't use it for this case). So I have to manually crop each video.

What I would expect to be able to do is to see a preview of the video along with some crop handles that I can just drag over the video preview to set which rectangular portion of the video I want to encode. But I can't do that, so instead I have to enter numbers manually. Okay, so I do that.

But obviously I don't know the exact numbers (how would I know?) so I just guess the number of pixels then click the Summary tab to check the preview. I never get it right first time so I click the Dimensions tab, change the number of pixels, go back to the Summary tab and check the preview. And this goes on until the video is cropped correctly.

What I can't fathom for the life of me is why the crop settings and the preview image are in two separate tabs? It's long-winded enough that I need to enter numbers one at a time, but that wouldn't be too bad if I didn't need to constantly switch between tabs to check what the crop settings look like. Surely there must be an easier way. This can't be by design?

Steps to reproduce the problem (If Applicable):




HandBrake version (e.g., 1.0.0):

1.3.3


Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Creators Update):

Windows 7 64-bit


HandBrake Activity Log ***required*** (see How-to get an activity log)

Activity log not required for this as the video encoding works fine.

Code: Select all

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[s55]

The summary tab is not meant to be used for crop preview. It doesn't work for that purpose as the image is heavily scaled so cropping will be inaccurate.

There is a dedicated preview window (see toolbar, and if your using a nightly build, includes crop controls on it).

That said, the development community behind HandBrake is tiny and volunteer driven in peoples free time. Given that most of the time people are either using Autocrop or No-Crop, there just hasn't been any interest or real demand to further develop the preview window as it's not heavily used.

There are open feature requests for various improvements to the preview window. (Jail-bars, corner zooming etc). Anyone in the community can pick these up if they are interest. Otherwise, there are literally hundreds of higher demand features on the list at the moment so it'll probably be a while before this gets picked up.

[Deleted User 13735]

Cropping is there to remove black borders to aid encoding efficiency, not as an editing tool.
You need a nonlinear editor for what you are trying to do: Davinci Resolve is free.

[rollin_eng]

Cropping is there to remove black borders to aid encoding efficiency, not as an editing tool.

Not really, cropping can be used for many reasons.

[gentleben]

Thanks for the in-depth reply s55. I never thought of using the Preview window with the dimensions settings. It's crude and it's frustrating that i need to have the preview window open, it would be much better if it worked like the Summary preview window, but it's better nothing.

@musicvid, I have used DaVinci Resolve many times and I know that I can crop videos with it. However, I can only use an older version (14) because I run Windows 7. The problem with Resolve is that when I crop a video with it, it only adds black borders. It doesn't actually change the video size. I've tried everything I can think of. So when I upload the encoded video to WhatsApp, it uploads as a tiny little video in a 720p size frame. Whereas when I crop with HandBrake, the actual video is resized so that it fills the screen on my phone perfectly. Do you know how to do the same with Resolve?

[Deleted User 13735]

Sorry I can't give you instruction for using an editing program here. If you crop without resizing the output of course it will have borders.
Glad your use of the preview in Handbrake is allowing you to do what you want.