How To Easily Crop Video Using Inexpensive Software Tools

In today's age of video editing and the power of YouTube, uploading video clips onto the internet has become common. What if you need to upload a video clip that is surrounded by the sometimes annoying black bars? You can actually upload the video straight to a site like YouTube, but with the black bars surrounding the top and bottom of the clip, your viewers may find your particular clip uninteresting due to its lack of details.

Removing black bars from video clips used to require expensive video editing tools that only movie studios can afford. However, that is not very true anymore, if you have the right tools and software. This article will explain the tools and software required in order to achieve this.

I used a copy of QuickTime Player 7 Pro. QuickTime Player 7 is a free download from Apple's website. QuickTime Player 7 is a powerful software tool that allows you to view videos on the internet, HD versions of movie trailers and your own personal media. It is highly compatible with a wide variety of formats. There are also third-party plugins that extends the capabilities of QuickTime Player 7 such as enabling it to play even more media formats. You will need to upgrade to the Pro edition of this software in order to edit video. You may find out more about upgrading to the Pro version at Apple's website.

Besides QuickTime Player 7 Pro, you will also need an image editor software such as Photoshop or its alternatives. For this article, I opted for Pixelmator, which is a cheaper alternative to Adobe's Photoshop. The instructions in this article will also be tailored towards Pixelmator's.

Begin by opening the video clip in QuickTime Player 7 Pro. As you can see from the screenshot to the right, I have a video clip which is surrounded by black bars around the top, bottom, left and right. This is usually called windowboxing. We will attempt to remove all the black bars from this video clip.

Start by selecting Copy from the Edit menu. This will create a static image copy of your video clip in the system clipboard. Next, launch your image editor software and create a new image. Most image editors would have detected a static image copy in the system clipboard and will offer to create a new image file with the appropriate dimensions. Select Paste from the Edit menu to paste the static image copy into the new image file.

Next, begin by selecting the areas that you want preserved. For my video clip, this is obviously the area in the middle of the image.

Clear the selected area by choosing Clear from the Edit menu. Next, select Inverse from the Edit menu, and proceed to clear this area as well by choosing Clear from the Edit menu.

With the outer area still selected, choose Fill... from the Edit menu. When prompted, select the Color and set it to white. You will see the surrounding area filled with white color immediately. Click on OK to dismiss the prompt.

We are not there yet. Next, select Inverse from the Edit menu again. The selection eclipse will now focus on the inner area. Choose Fill... from the Edit menu but this time, set the color to black.

You will end up with an image similar to the screenshot below. What you have just done is to create a mask that will tell QuickTime Player to crop the areas marked with white color and preserve the areas marked with black color.

Save the newly created image as a GIF file. Don't ask me why, but this is the format required by QuickTime. You may close the image editing software once done.

Next, return to your video clip in QuickTime Player 7 Pro. Select Show Movie Properties from the Window menu. Click on Video Track and select the Visual Settings tab.

Select the button labeled Choose... from the area labeled Mask. When prompted, choose the GIF image that you created earlier. Notice that the video clip gets cropped once you clicked on OK.

You are almost done. Try playing the video clip to ensure that the cropping is as expected.

When ready, select Save from the File menu to complete the process. If prompted, choose to save the file in the appropriate format that will be editable by your video editing software later.

Well, that's it. You have just learned how to easily crop video using inexpensive software tools. Feel free to ask questions by leaving a comment. My knowledge in this area is still limited, but I will try my best to answer or point you in the right direction.

Enjoy!