How do I rotate and crop a video like a photo?

Question

I'm experienced at photo editing, and new to video editing.

I'm trying to edit this video, where the road is at an angle:

I want it to be straight like this:

When I rotate the video in Premiere Elements, I get black corners:

Obviously, I don't want those.

I know I can zoom in the video to fill the canvas, but I instead want to crop and reduce the canvas size. For example, there might be too much stuff above the road which I want to crop out. I want to do this visually, by dragging a crop rectangle, rather than choosing an aspect ratio. I don't know what aspect ratio I want. I want to try it out visually and make a decision based on esthetics rather than numbers like 2.39:1. How do I do that?

This is similar to how in Lightroom, I rotate and crop a photo based on what looks good. When I export it, the exported photo has a lower width and height in pixels. How do I do this for a video in Premiere Elements?

Steve Grisetti · Answer

Editing video is a little different than editing photos. When you edit photos, you're editing the photo itself. When you crop it or rotate it, you're rotating the actual file. When you edit video, you're placing the video within a project and rotating and cropping it within a project. In other words, cropping and rotating video only changes it within the project's timeline, as you're seeing. You can't reduce a video's "canvas size".

As you've discovered, you can resize the video to fill the frame. Or you can create a new project at a certain size or shape and fit the video within that video frame. But you can't resize the video project by resizing the video you put into it.

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