Ubuntu – Video Editor where I can select specific areas

video-editor

I am looking for a Video Editor that I can use to select specific areas it different time frames. For example, in a video that is 1920×1080 let's say I want in the first minute to only show an area of 1024×768 located in an area of the total 1920×1080. Then after that I want to select another area in another part. The end result should show the video with only the selected areas.

This is because there is a lot of parts that do not correspond to what I want to show in the video.

I tried Pitivi, OpenShot and Avidemux. None have an option to select an area of the video.

Best Answer

Avconv/ffmpeg

Whenever we do not find an option to do a specific task we may find a command line tool more promising.

To achieve a video with clipped content from a time segment of our source we basically need the video filters trim, and crop from avconv/ffmpeg (whichever you prefer to use). Please read the documentation in the libav manual sections for all options.

Below example will produce a video from the first minute of our source with cropping a central area of 1024x768.

avconv -i <inputfile> -vf trim 0:60 crop=out_w=1024:out_h=768 <outputfile>

Cropping from another position than the center will need different parameters which can very nicely be fine-tuned (several examples are given in the libav documentatiton). Audio is not treated in this example. If your video contains audio you may have to trim the audio track as well.

The resulting clip will then have to be of course joined again with the orginal video which we will also have to trimm to the beginning, and the end of our transformed clip.

OpenShot

The crop feature is hidden in the clip's properties/layout settings. After we had selected an area (use the Razorblade too) of our clip we may select this sub-clip's properties with a right mouse click.

In the now opening menu choose the Layout tab to select an area to clip. Adjust height, width, and X, Y values until you are happy. A preview window will help doing so.

Below example uses a video with a constant view on the scene (as it is shown in the lower screen shot).

enter image description here
^{Enlarged to 200 % at the start of the clip}

enter image description here ^{Back to 100 % at the end of the clip}

Smooth transition

In the example above I started with a clipped region of the video at the beginning of my sample video fragment zoomed to 200% ("Start of Clip"). By undoing the enlagement at the end of my fragment to 100 % ("End of Clip") OpenShot will render a smooth transition between the two extremes (200% -> 100%) very much as if we had operated the camera zoom. With values for X or Y we can do the same resluting in an camera shift movement from the beginning to the end of the clip.

Static crop

In case we want a static clipped area only we just make the effect's value the same for the beginning and the end of the clip.

Details: OpenShot Manual

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – n easy way to edit gtk-recordMyDesktop videos

You need to convert them first... they never worked without converting (at least for me):

mencoder -idx out.ogv -o out.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc

Then you can edit them in your favourite video editor (I for one prefer Avidemux).

Ubuntu – use Pitivi to trim a video, without re-encoding it

PiTiVi is a Non-Linear video editor first and foremost, and so it doesn't have a "copy" mode.

You have probably noticed that Avidemux has several "modes" of work. Cutting/splitting videos without re-encoding can only be done in "Copy" mode. It also means that no video filters can be applied.

The "Copy" mode works by copying the raw compressed video from the original file (container) into the new file (container). That's why you can't use video filters in this mode. You might have noticed that this cutting doesn't actually work always with exact precision. Effectively, "Copy" mode can only split on keyframes, and that means that unless you chose a keyframe to split on, your resulting video will have a few more frames than what you intended. Usually too few to notice, but they are there anyway. However, with some specific codecs, Avidemux can do "Smartcopy" as explained here on the website

If your file uses MSMPEG-4 (DivX ;-) 3) or MPEG-4 video, you can use smart copy mode. Smart copy will leave most frames unchanged, but re-encode the part that lost its reference images with a fixed quantizer. So in our example, frames ab and nop would remain unchanged, while frames jkl would be re-encoded to use a different reference frame. Smart copy will ask you for a value for the quantizer to use – 4 or 5 is generally OK.

So you still get some video re-encoding, though minimal.

PiTiVi is a Non-Linear video editor first and foremost, and so it doesn't have a "copy" mode, which would prevent any track-mixing and any video effects. Which I think is good, because people would turn it on, and you would get complaints that the video effects don't work :)