How to make smaller file size by cropping just part of the video

OK folks, by using bits of all the answers I have been given I have managed to make the file size smaller by cropping just part of the video.
What I did was;

1. create a new project 640x480
2. import the cameras 1600x900 file (16:9) file
3. Use edit/video effects/clip - 'clip' by accident, I meant to use 'crop' but 'clip' worked !??
4. Clip the image to the closest I could guess would be 16:9
5. Increase magnification to 400% so that the clipped area fills the monitor panel
6. 'Share' the file to a 720 mpeg file but changing the size to 640x480

And bingo! The resulting video file shows just the cropped area and the file size is reduced from 57MB to 3MB no with no apparent loss of definition.

I suspect that I would have achieve much the same result if I had missed out some of the steps. For instance maybe steps 1 and 5, but these were all the steps recommended in several posts so I included them all for luck!

This is how I did it in V10; maybe later versions have made it simpler.

Thanks again everybody.

good going !

It may help, if you do this in future, to think about it like this:

imagine a photo you have framed on a wall ....and you want to just see the center area.

take an empty frame that is smaller ( same aspect ratio of 16:9) and hold it over the already larger framed photo. Now you just see the center if you "export" the smaller frame contents.

The frames represent the project sizes ( 4k, 1080p, 720p, etc. )

: )

good luck and thanks for trying to share nature animal stuff with seniors, cause they don't get out much like they used to and love that stuff.

It's been beer thirty in my apt. for 3 hours already, so I have a head start

🙂

if you put the 1280 stuff into a 640 project and make sure it's set to 100% you'll get an essentially cropped image. You're right photoshop crop is way different.

Increasing monitor magnification will have no effect on PPro full frame size exports.

Is the result in the 640 project at least a little better in terms of seeing animals closer ? Is the file size low enough to share with email ?

I think maybe this thread is devolving into 2 separate issues.

1) make "crop" because action is in distance and poster only needs to show animals in distance

2) how to export and attach that file ( if small enough) to emails for nice old people to enjoy.''

This first problem hasn't been solved because poster doesn't realize the black bars of full frame along with image that was manually scaled down is also 'shared' , which means the file size will not decrease demonstrably. The poster doesn't seem to know how to create a smaller project size and let the source material overflow the full frame of the smaller project ( hence essentially cropping the image ).

It may take some time to figure out all this stuff but I'm really happy the poster is obviously trying hard and responding quickly to suggestions by fellow users of the program.

Why not just upload the videos to YouTube or Vimeo (or similar) and then just email the link?  There are privacy options if that's a concern.  That's been SOP for years.  On Vimeo there is even the option to download the video if they want to.

this will probably sound weird unless you know about this stuff already. I'll try to explain in nutshell:

Let's say your project is 1080p 16:9 24FPS progressive, square pixels...

Open new project of 720p, same specs.

Import your 1080p stuff ( either the orignal or the exported mp4 )

Now make the video overflow the 720p frame size ( make it 100% )

This will crop the image to the center.

Export and see if file size is small enough.

If not export another smaller size from the 720p project, which might mean going into custom settings on export to make sure it's 16:9, square pixels, 24fps, etc.

???

make sense a little ??

Filesize = bitrate x duration.

Lowering bitrate is your best option but email is not the way to go.

Filesharing is: Dropbox, WeTransfer etc.