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.
