How to crop black bars from video?

I want to do something really simple on mobile video editors. I want to

  1. trim the video - this I can do.
  2. crop the black bars off the side of the video. If I use the edge crop filter, the rendered video is still the original size. Is there a way to drag white bars to content and crop entire video?
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If you mean just scaling up you can use the transform effect.
A screenshot might help explain what you want to do

Go from a video looking like this with black bars


to this

The rendered video output size is changed to the crop. For easy cropping, you drag white bars to mark the zone you don’t want

As seen here

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Oh I think you need to change your project’s resolution to avoid zooming in / having blank space.

I don’t want to do this manually, I want to do it with the edge crop interface, or by dragging a white bar

I’m here for this cause the new season of May Fair Witches has those annoying bars. I didn’t buy a 32 inch 4k monitor to be cheated out of viewing area.

Unfortunately, this feature is not available in Kdenlive. I also recommend to use the Crop, Scale and Tilt effect instead of Edge Crop (this is actually a filter meant for internal use) for any cropping. Still, your best approach is to set the project dimensions to what the cropped video is meant to be, and then use the Transform effect to scale it to fill the screen.

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That’s a shame, it’s a standard feature on all integrated phone gallery apps…

I don’t know the size the cropped video will be. Playing with the crop numbers until it before it removes visible pixels, on both sides, then subtracting both sides from the original video dimension, centring the remaining frame, then changing the project dimensions is clearly far too much effort for something that should take 5 seconds.

Well, Kdenlive is a video editing software, not a phone gallery app or image processing tool.

You could use Handbrake to crop the black bars, then import the video into Kdenlive, and when asked have Kdenlive adjust the project settings to the dimensions of the video (now without the black bars).

Or you could donate to Kdenlive and create a feature request in bugs.kde.org and hope that it will be implemented :wink:

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and for bonus points - after you’ve gone to all this Too Much Effort to remove Those Black Bars and created a video with some totally random aspect ratio - then as soon as BlueUSA tries to play it full screen so as not to be Cheated Out Of Viewing Area, then their video player is going to either:

  • a) distort the hell out of it.

  • b) wait for it … waaaait for it … put Those Black Bars right back again to fill the space left by your oddball selection of frame size!

And it will do that for you in a lot less than 5 seconds : D

If you don’t want it edge filled, you’re going to need to pick the aspect ratio that you’re targeting and scale your source clip how you want it to fit that. And that should take a lot less than 5 seconds too. It’s amazing how much time you can save when you don’t try to Be Too Clever …

c) crop the edges to make your oddball frame size fill the screen without black bars

d) give them the choice of a, b or c, to meet the needs of their specific use case, and unique display configuration.

Much better that way.

Leave me out of your crap DUD oops I meant dude.

thank you for your bold contribution to helping explain the problem.

You can set trolls to ignore on here. Recommended.

Yea I know so now RON is blocked

I looked for major open source desktop video editing software and thought Kdenlive had the biggest chances, given I saw blog posts about the edge crop feature. Can we not post suggestions on this forum?

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The problem isn’t that suggestions are unwelcome - it’s with the mechanics of what you’re imagining being able to do.

Your initial problem is you have a square peg that’s been put into a rectangular hole, and now you want to “get rid of the spaces around the long side of the hole” …

But you can’t do that by “edge cropping the hole” - and even if you somehow did, your square peg is still going to have spaces around it in everyone else’s rectangular hole.

Video mostly isn’t like still images that you can crop to any arbitrary size - you start by picking the format you want to target, then manipulate your source material to fit that format.

If you want a 4:3 aspect video, start with a project in a standard size in that aspect and fit what you want into that. You just have to accept that when someone tries to watch it on a 16:9 display, one of the a - d outcomes is death and taxes style inevitable.

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The format isn’t a common ratio, but a random combination of width and height, thus draggable limit bars is really the only simple way.

Change the profile to be the resolution that the device screenrecords at. Have the screen recording open in the gallery on-device and swipe up to view the resolution or right click on the file in dolphin and view Properties. Just easier that way. And you can save it to custom profiles as well.

The images of the game is an example, in reality the length, size, and location of the desired content within the video is not predictable