I recently watched a series of excellent Internet videos whose creator described shooting in 4:3 and protecting for 16:9 He then cropped the web exports (wmv) to play with a widescreen aspect (wmp reports 480X270). My efforts to do the same using the crop tool in Procoder Express change the shape of the visible screen but seem to leave a large black area at the bottom which forces WMP to display the video at the top of the screen in the compact mode. You don't notice it with the player maximized because there's black surrounding the frame anyway but when you use the compact player you realize the black rectangle below the video is part of the exported frame. His don't behave that way. They play surrounded by black bars of equal size on four sides, when run in the compact player. Inotherwords they really are cropped to widescreen-like proportion. Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about know what I can do about it?

David Hurdon

widescreen is not square, so i'm not sure how you'd have exported black bars on all 4 sides that are all the same size.

if you are doing this for the internet, the last thing you want to be encoding is black bars, because it's probably gonna take up unnecessary bandwidth.

if you are doing this for the internet, the last thing you want to be encoding is black bars, because it's probably gonna take up unnecessary bandwidth.

Right, Dan. That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I'm prepared to lose data top and bottom to achieve the widescreen look but I haven't found a tool/method for actually eliminating what I crop, versus having it hidden in black.

David Hurdon

i think that i see what you are saying... if you cropped it at the source, with the video editor, you'd have to output it in a format other than dv... which would mean re-encoding the entire clip to another video format.

unless you are able to access procoder directly from the timeline? as in frameserving it from vegas, for instance.