Indeed Edge crop is weird. But did you try “Crop by padding”? (You can let the padding transparent.)
Or “Crop, scale and tilt” ? These works pretty much the same as in other NLE SW.
Note, the “tilt” in the last effect indeed should be named shift, as it shifts the image along X and Y axis. Set apart the name the effect is pretty useful for typical cropping tasks.
I’m not sure I got what you mean. “Crop scale and tilt” doesn’t change resolution unless you play with scale X and Y. Changing aspect ratio is exactly what the crop should do, by cropping. Set apart the scale and “tilt” (that you can ignore) this effect works the same as the “Crop” effect in Premiere Pro.
I think what OP wants to do is to crop the video and then render just the cropped part.
Currently, you set the output resolution in the project profile. The render dialog allows to change the output resolution but not the aspect ratio, and it simply scales the project.
What OP is missing - I think - is a render option to “cut off” the black parts that resulted from the crop. That, of course, changed the dimensions and the aspect ratio. Instead of calculating that manually, creating a new project profile with the new dimensions and a/r, OP wants that to be automated. A bit like Handbrake being able to detect black bars and excluding them from the final video.
There is a feature in ffmpeg that does that (haven’t tested it myself, so use at your own risk). It’s called cropdetect and is described here. Together with the crop command you may be able to put something together after you rendered your video with Kdenlive. It is still an extra step, but at least it doesn’t re-encode the video.
Not “too stupid” - just using the wrong tool and/or thinking about the problem the wrong way.
Typically editing video isn’t like “editing” a still photgraph - where you start with a raw shot, crop and reframe the interesting bit, do whatever else you want, then scale it an publish.
With video, you usually start by figuring out what your target aspect ratio and resolution will be, then fit your raw sources to that. Not the other way around.
If you try to crop a video to some arbitrary size, then players are just going to add black bars around it, or distort it, or crop bits out of it, to suit the size of the monitor or viewport it’s being watched on.
This comes up every now and then, but it’s probably not really what you want. Pick a nice standard resolution, then ‘crop’ or scale your source to fit into that, and you’ll probably be much happier in the long run.
I understand how the ‘Crop, Scale, Tilt’ effect works in terms of selecting an area. My core need is to crop the video to isolate a specific area, and then render/export only that cropped region at its new, exact pixel dimensions. The problem isn’t the cropping itself or quality loss if I export at the new smaller size; it’s that these resulting dimensions (width and height) are different every time, and I’m trying to find a way to avoid manually calculating and setting them for each export.
I was also searching for this just now: I have a video where my avatar shows up in the center of a wide screen, and I want to crop the center and render only the cropped part so that I have a variation of my video that looks better when viewed on mobile.
I managed to do something that works by:
Using the Crop, Scale and Tilt effect to crop the sides, and
In Render Project, clicking on More Options → Aspect Ratio → Square (1:1) (using Vertical (9:16) works but would cut out my subtitles)
I’m not sure if the first step is actually needed, I haven’t tried if just the second step already works.
This just so happens to work in my case, but it doesn’t work when you want to crop a specific area that is far from the center of the screen.
There is a use case where a tutorial video needs to be quickly recorded, edited and uploaded for students.
However, cutting and hard cropping is tedious in Linux. No one wants to do part of the task in an editor like kdenlive and another part with ffmpeg in the shell, having to calculate the relevant numbers by hand.
As described above, Android apps like CapCut and even Gallery can do this. There is no equivalent tool in Linux.
Currently, it is easier to transfer the video from Linux to Android, perform all editing steps there, and then transfer it back. I used to need Windows for these sorts of tasks, a long time ago.
Some may want to learn video editing, and kdenlive seems to be a powerful tool. But if it doesn’t even meet the first, basic requirements of some users, then there is no incentive to learn it.
I misunderstood the issue, yours and OP’s intention is to keep the same ratio that is cropped. I was having trouble with my cropped video (I want to keep the videos in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the project) being in a different position in terms of X and Y in the preview monitor vs when it rendered.
Even for my issue I just tested checking and unchecking the rescale box and it makes no difference so it was something different that I did to fix my issue and I’m not sure what it was.
Sorry about the confusion, I’ll delete my comment.
I agree with Ron- it seems the goal is to create non-standard sized video.
While possible, and it has use cases, the OP has found that it’s extremely cumbersome.
As the vast majority of the industry and the market has centered on 16:9 videos, screens, TV’s etc, creating non–standard aspect ratios is a bit niche. Needed in those niche cases, but not something that the typical “video” editor will be aptly designed to do.
I’d like to chime in here as I’m having the same issue.
In any previous video editing app I used (mainly on Windows), I could crop out (reframe) part of a scene at the same aspect ratio as the project (or even a different one) and it would be rendered as full frame with the resolution of the project. I have many use cases for that.
One example: Taking short clips with my camera (DSLR) and then cropping them to zoom in because I didn’t have a longer telephoto lens. When I shot in 4k, I usually get good quality at FHD after cropping.
The problem I have right now: I shot my agility trainig session with my dog using my drone.
To not disturb the dog too much with the drone noise, I flew relatively high, thinking I could simply crop the footage later to “zoom in”.
I imagine there are a lot more cases where this functionality would be very useful.
So, right now, I have start my old Windows machine just to quickly (…) edit that 5 minute clip I need …
