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kalamazandy
kalamazandy
Known Participant
January 9, 2019
Question

custom crop proportions?

  • January 9, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 943 views

It's listing a bunch, but I need to crop a video for some stupid web div that's 21:9. There's no editing other than this. I don't really want to create a project in Premiere Just to crop.

So I'm doing it in AME. No problem. Wait, I have to bust out Math? No problem, but since it's an odd ratio, and I'm compressing the Hell out of it to get it down to about 1-2MB, It's ok that I'm doing something like 1620x694, or even smaller, rather than keeping it full 1920 width. I'd love to just put in a ratio, grab one corner, put it where I think I might want to crop to, then just drag the other one.

But right now, I have to get it kind of close, do a little cross multiply and divide to get my size, but...rather than showing you the Size of your rectangle, haha, AME shows you how much you're cropping. You can see the size if you hover your mouse, but you can only adjust how much it's cropped from the top and bottom and sides. Sooo useful.

So if you're the type that, rather than answering my first question, wants to go and tell me about some workaround that takes an unnecessary amount of time, there you have it. I have that already. Keep your unneeded comments to yourself. If you can't make that process faster, or tell me what file I need to change to my weird aspect ratio to the list, then move along buddy.

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    1 reply

    Warren Heaton
    Community Expert
    Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 22, 2019

    Sounds like you have it all under control, kalamazandy.

    The thing about Media Encoder is that it's not an editor like Premiere Pro and After Effects.  As such, and as you've noticed, it's options for editing the frame size of the source that you've added to the Queue is limited.  It's also probably worth mentioning that the format that you're exporting to must support your custom frame size as well.

    When I need to do custom frame sizes, I pick After Effects first and then Premiere Pro second.  In After Effects, you're up and running with fewer clicks than Premiere Pro and there's no need to save the After Effects project file if you don't want to (although, I always do - even for the quick stuff).  Then just use File > Export > Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue to pick up on the AME side without the custom frame size issues.

    -Warren

    kalamazandy
    kalamazandyAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 23, 2019

    Now, see, I get that. That makes sense, if YOU are doing the compression. But any web guy could be using AME to do this themselves with Very little training. That's why I'm Specifically asking about AME, in the AME forum.

    I know how to do it in Premiere and AE. I was looking for a way to do it in AME, so when the web guys are playing around with changing a div size, I can set them up with the ability to crop the original 16:9 to whatever size they want. They don't need to waste hard drive space with AE or Premiere Just to crop a video to the aspect that they want.

    The annoying thing is, even though it's not an Editor, it has the capabilities. It has ratios already set. You can crop them however you like. But you have to figure out how you want to crop it in, what, Photoshop first? if you know the aspect ratio? Then calculate how many pixels from each edge.

    But if you could just enter a custom ratio, you'd be all set.

    Back in the good old days, developers had options like that stored in an xml file, or some plain text file somewhere, and we could just edit that to change custom options. Now they seem to encrypt everything. I'm hoping that's to make something faster for us, because otherwise it's a drag.

    Also I'm using WebM, which allows really any size you want, unlike H.264 where you have to choose a specific profile for different sizes otherwise things fall apart or it changes your size a bit. WebM is also much smaller in most cases. However, it takes FOREVER to render.

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