Easiest way to crop the top of all the frames in a video

February 24, 2021 5:13 PM

I have a video that has a distracting small object at the top of all the frames. What's the fastest way for me to remove that for the entire video? The object is in the same place and doesn't move.
posted by storybored to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

The FFMpeg crop filter.

ffmpeg -i myvideo.mp4 -filter:v "crop=W:H:X:Y" croppedvideo.mp4

Where:

• W is the width of the output video you want, the same as the input video.
• H is the height of the video you want to finish with, that being the height of your input video minus however many pixels you want to trim.
• X is zero, and
• Y is however many pixels you want to trim.

posted by mhoye at 5:32 PM on February 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

I, like, barely know what I'm talking about, but if this is something you can throw into iMovie, you can just zoom in a little bit?
posted by stray at 6:36 PM on February 24, 2021

Keep in mind, if you need to maintain a particular aspect ratio, removing height you will need to remove width as well. Otherwise you could stretch it and see how the results look. And possibly resize back to a particular resolution.

Seconding ffmpeg that mhoye mentions, it's the swiss army knife of video tools. It's complicated, but has extensive documentation. ffmpeg docs
posted by TheAdamist at 7:07 PM on February 24, 2021

A better question is... What are you editing on?

My thought was to throw on an overlay logo in the corner.
posted by kschang at 3:20 AM on February 25, 2021 [2 favorites]