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[DressedForSucess]

Heyy

In my game, im doing some animations ... One includes a flock of seaguls flying about the tower in the distance in the image ive posted (no shadows, incomplete; just tester rendering).

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good video/animation cropping freeware/software i can get hold of ...

Cheers

[Tanzim]

Windows movie maker can crop videos, and I hear WAX 2.0 is good for composition and special effects

[lynn22]

You can crop and much more... in Virtualdub

added : and it's freeware 

[DressedForSucess]

Wikid

Yeah ive used WAX before, and hve VirtualDub. How do you crop videos with it??

[Tanzim]

Um, when you say crop do you mean to take out parts you don't want or to reduce video length?

[chaz]

VirtualDub will remove front end, back end, or cut segments.  very easy to do.  I also use it to convert video from camcorder to targa files (.tga frames) for sequencing into voodoo camera tracking.

[3D Joe Wiltshire]

hi dressed for success, that scene is really coming along, in case some people didn't quite understand, i think he was asking for something that can actually crop frames in an animation, eg. cut out a small part of the image on each frame of an animation, so that in the game he can have an animation running in a small part of the scene (the birds flying around) but not have anything else animated at the same time sorta thing

this is kinda hard to describe, but i think i understand it, unfortunately i don't really use any video editing software 

[DressedForSucess]

Yeah. Basically cropping videos ...

Im wondering HOW you do this with Virtual Dub

[Alpha2]

I dont beleive that's possible in Vdub. It's a great application but not designed for surgical editing. I'd suggest looking through this list, you might find the right one here, although it might end up being shareware.

[chaz]

Open virtualdub, then

file>open video file

After your video file have opened:

At the bottom of the video box, you'll see what looks like vcr controls. the rightmost buttons look like birds flying in different directions.  those are the mark in and mark out buttons for cutting/deleting.  Slide the progress bar until you have the video where you want to begin your cut.  click on the 'mark in' button (the one on the left). use the slider again to get to the end of the segment you want to cut out, then click on the 'mark out' to delete the segment.  I don't know if you can undelete so be careful.
chaz

[Roygee]

From what I understand of this thread, DressedForSuccess wants to crop scenes in a video file, not trim it?  This can be done in Pinnacle Studio, but I don't know of any free software that has the capability.  If you really want to do this and don't mind a lot of very repetitive work, you can convert the video file to individual frames with VirtualDub - open video file>export image sequence.  You can them crop each frame in any editing app, save each frame under a new name.  It seems that VirtualDub can reassemble the video, but I haven't gone into that (life is too short).
 If not, you can load the images into Terranim8or as animated material, open in Anim8or and render as .avi.  You would have to be really desperate to do it this way

[thecolclough]

hadn't thought of this before, but now that roygee mentioned splitting the video up and cropping the frames separately... if you're willing to go with the split-it-into-separate-images method, i know a couple of jpeg batch utilities which would do a lot of the hard work for you:

to batch-crop a bunch of jpeg images, i'd reccommend JPEGCrops, which is a little piece of freeware written by a guy in his spare time (sound familiar?   ), that just crops jpegs, with no extra whistles or gongs to get in the way.  it's a nice, simple program that only does a single job, but does it quite well.  i've used it to crop literally thousands of frames for my stopmotion work.

and then, to put all those nicely-cropped jpegs back together into a video file again, i'd first advise that you try reassembling them in your video editor (if you've got one), but if that won't work easily, then check out JPGVideo, which, again, is just a small program that does only one job, but is pretty good at it.  its sole purpose in life is to take a folderful of jpeg images, and put them all together in a row to make a video file.

just thought i'd throw that in, for what it's worth

- colclough

[DressedForSucess]

Your techniques sound interesting I will definately give it a go

By the way, do you know of any good video compression software? I have Cinepak with Virtual Dub, however,because im making a game, i think people would have to download Cinepak in order to play the videos ...

I heard Bink Vid is great but i can never seem to use it

Anyone know much about Bink?
Its used a lot in most games ...

[ENSONIQ5]

I'm not really sure what you mean by cropping.  If you are going to animate the scene, why not animate the birds at the same time?  If the birds will be the only moving thing, why not just animate them and use the render as a background?  If you are trying to combine two separate animations, that will be harder, and will require techniques mentioned by Roygee and thecolclough, in my opinion.  Personally I would use a green-screen, alpha channel type method, using transparent backgrounds (see the section in the manual where Steve places the bird in the photo with the cat), but the frames would still have to be individually combined (in my case in Corel PhotoPaint, which can dissemble a video into editable frames and reassemble into AVI or whatever).  If the camera for each animation does not move in the same way, however, you will have quite a task ahead of you.

[DressedForSucess]

its fairly straight forward ... the cropped animations are evident in a m,ajority of point and click games, such as riven, myst, dark fall, etc ...

obviously, i am first going to render the entire scene as an animation. but implementing this vid into the game, compressed, etc, will increase the overral file size of the game (as there are going to be quite a few anims) but also visual quality. cropping it just takes out everything except the particular animated area (eg. a lever being pulled). This would be quite a small animation after being cropped. it is then placed ontop of the rendered image, rather than a whole screen view cutscene playing when the player pulls the lever.

i hope i could make it clearer.

i understand now that adobe premiere can crop. the methods shown above are very useful indeed and sound as though will work ...


other anims which may include being in a railcart that only has a screen in which the blue can see through requires the green screen method ... but thats another issue lol