Hi Louis

It can be done however you may well have problems creating a DVD/BD or exporting - if you wish to try you can change the aspect ratio of the movie by pressing the E key or select File, Settings, Movie and change the settings shown here to what you need - note to get   2.35 : 1   I had to enter 235:100 in the aspect ratio box.

When you add your movie and image clips to the project you will get a message popup saying the aspect ratios are different do you want to adjust - always click Do not adjust.

You will have to manually crop/resize/move/zoom the images to get the portion you require if they are of a different aspect ratio to the movie.

A better approach may be to use the nearest standard ratio to the one you want and accept some black borders to maintain the image ratio you want. 

To make this easier adjusting the video and image clips you can adjust the image size/zoom/section settings on the first clip see Terry's image in his post.  Right click the clip and choose  Video Effect, Save video effects.  Save the effect. 

You can then reload this effect to all the other clips by using right clicking the objects and selecting Video Effect,  and the option you need to insert them .

Or in the same session right click select Video Effects, Copy video effects and then select the other objects, right click and select Video Effects, and the option you need to insert them (there are three alteranatives at the bottom of the list)..

John

Hi,

The effort involved will obviously depend greatly on the content of the material. At one extreme, every clip will need individual editing in the Section and Size and position dialogs under Movement effects. At the other, you may be able to crop most clips identically. For example, if I had many clips like this one taken at 640 x 480 with my old digicam's movie facility, 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/MEP17-235-1.jpg

then I'd probably export the lot as they stood, say as MP4, re-import, then apply a single crop as shown (followed by a fixed downward shift).

Edit: No I wouldn't; I'd use John's neater method!

You don't say what your source material is or what output you're aiming to achieve, so I'm curious why you want to make such a crop?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi,

Changing the aspect ratio automatically is easy but the end result look what you see on TV the faces are double size width or personnage look 200 kg. Cropping and resizing is not easy.

If you start to use video editor the learning curve is high before to control or master this process.

Regards,

YR

There's a really easy way to do this, without image distortion.

1. First, we must calculate the resolution of the resulting ~2.35:1 video. Because we want to crop the video on its vertical ends and keep the full (horizontal) width, we take the width of the original resolution and divide it by 2.35. Therefore, if the source material is 1920x1080, the result is 1920/2.35=817.02.... Since most video codecs require that the resolution must be divisble by 8 in both axes (I guess that's for macroblocking) we must find the nearest number that fits which is 816.

Other resolution examples if you want to end at roughly 2.35:1 (I'm using X for the vertical resolution because it doesn't matter, as long as the original movie isn't even wider than 2.35:1 but this would be very unusual):

1280xX --> 1280x544 (544.68...)

720xX --> 720x304 (306.38...)

640xX --> 640x272 (272.34...)

480xX --> 480x208 or 480x200 (204.25...)

But please be aware that if you have an anamorphic source video (like DV-AVI, SVCD/DVD video) this will make the calculation a lot more complicated if you want to keep higher quality. Respond if you want me to write it down.

2. Start a new project in MEP and enter both the resolution and the AR (Instead of 40:17 you can also simply write 1920:816) like that:

You must also enter the correct framerate manually, if you don't know the framerate of your source video you can look it up either in the Win7 explorer or by running the file through MediaInfo (google and download it). MEP will ask you to adapt the monitor settings, choose "yes".

3. Import your video file and if asked do not adapt the project settings to the video file! If you have chosen to adapt earlier and checked "Don't ask me again" then you must reactivate the dialogue in the program settings or do a reset.

It'll look like this now:

As you can see there are black bars to the left (and right)

4. To get rid of them and zoom the picture to its original size, open "Effects -> Motion Effects -> Position/Size" (exact wording might differ in your language) and press in the following order: "Set original size" and then "Center":

As you can see, the monitor is completely filled now and the image has been cropped without distortions.

5. For further optimizitations you can go into "edit" mode and move the picture up/down so that you get the right center of action. After that, the "Left" value will probably be off so manually set it to "0" again. You can also manually change the "Top" value (circled in next picture) until you've found the right position.

Of course you can continue now with keyframes and let the area of the original video you've cut out "move" up/down.

EDIT: For some unknown reason, the forum software has cropped the last two of my screenshots.

The picture in 4. had two buttons to the right of where I wrote in red the number "2" and "1" which you have to click and under 5. I had circled the "Top" value which is visible in the image under 4. as "Oben"

Wouldn't it be good to get some feedback when you try to solve someone's problem!?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK