4.1

Chapter 5 Advanced tasks 70
Crop or pad the video frame
There are multiple ways you can customize the frame size of a source clip during transcoding.
The cropping and padding controls allow you a great degree of exibility and versatility.
Remove part of the source image
To remove part of the original source image, use the cropping controls in the Video inspector.
Depending on the “Frame size” setting (in the Video Properties section of the Video inspector),
cropping may or may not reveal black borders around the edges of your clips.
1 Do one of the following:
•
In the batch area, click an output row to select a setting that’s been applied to a job. With this
method, the modications you make will be used for outputting only that job.
•
In the Settings pane, select a custom setting from the Custom group. (If the Settings pane is
hidden, press Shift-Command-1.) With this method, the modications you make will be saved
to the custom setting for future use.
2 In the inspector pane, click Video to open the Video inspector.
If the inspector pane is not visible, click the Inspector button in the upper-right corner of the
Compressor window.
3 In the Cropping & Padding section of the Video inspector, do one of the following:
•
In the Cropping property, manually type a number in the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right elds to
crop the source image by that many pixels.
•
Choose a preset aspect ratio from the Cropping pop-up menu.
Note: If the aspect ratio you choose does not match the aspect ratio selected in the “Frame
size” pop-up menu (in the Video Properties section), you may see black bars around the edges
of your picture after the le is transcoded.
•
Choose Letterbox Area of Source from the Cropping pop-up menu. This instructs Compressor
to detect the black edges around the image in your source le and automatically enter crop
values to match them. This option is useful if you want to remove the letterbox area (the black
bars above and below a widescreen image) of a source media le.
•
In the preview area, click the Comparison button and position the pointer over the edges
of the frame until the pointer changes to a Crop pointer, then drag inward from the edge to
crop the image.
Note: Cropped edges are visible only on the preview side of the preview area (the right side);
the side of the preview area showing the Source media (the left side) does not display the
crop eect.
67% resize factor