Have you ever found a great video that you want to use for your project, but it is just too long? You might think that you need to cut out the parts you don’t need, but this can be tricky.
If you simply cut the video, you risk losing quality, which will affect the overall look of your project. Fortunately, there is a solution – cropping.
Cropping is the process of cutting off the edges of a video to create a smaller frame. This will allow you to remove unwanted sections without changing the resolution or aspect ratio of the video. In this tutorial, we will show you how to crop a video without losing quality using Ffmpeg.
What is Ffmpeg?
Ffmpeg is a powerful multimedia framework that can be used to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream and filter various media files. It supports most audio and video formats and can be used on various platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Step 1: Install Ffmpeg
The first step is to install Ffmpeg on your computer. You can download it from the official website – ffmpeg.org. The installation process will vary depending on your operating system.
Step 2: Open Command Prompt or Terminal
Once Ffmpeg is installed on your computer, open Command Prompt (Windows) or Terminal (Mac) and navigate to the directory where your video file is located.
Step 3: Determine Crop Values
Next, determine how much of the video you want to crop. You can do this by using an online tool like VideoCrop or by manually calculating the crop values.
To manually calculate crop values:
- Determine the width and height of your desired frame size.
- Subtract these values from the original width and height of your video to determine the amount of cropping required.
- Divide the result by two to get the crop values for both sides.
For example, if your original video is 1920×1080 and you want to crop it to 1280×720, you would subtract 1280 from 1920 (which equals 640) and subtract 720 from 1080 (which equals 360). Then, you would divide both values by two to get your crop values: “-vf crop=640:360”.
Step 4: Crop the Video
Now that you have your crop values, it’s time to crop the video. In Command Prompt or Terminal, type the following command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf crop=640:360 output.mp4
In this example, “input.mp4” is the name of your original video file and “output.mp4” is the name you want to give your cropped video file. Replace “640” and “360” with your own crop values.
Step 5: Preview Your Cropped Video
To make sure that your cropped video looks good and hasn’t lost any quality, preview it using a media player like VLC or QuickTime.
And there you have it – a simple way to crop a video without losing quality using Ffmpeg. With this knowledge, you can now confidently use longer videos in your projects without worrying about overwhelming your audience with unnecessary footage.
