Crop Clips

Silverstack allows to crop clips to a custom aspect ratio. Cropping is non-destructive as long a crop setting is not used for transcoding.

Cropping can be set via the “Crop” popover in the General Info tab on the right side of the main window. Learn more about the right sidebar in the article The Information Panel.

Crop Clips to a Custom Aspect Ratio

Go to the “General Info” Tab and scroll down to the “Processing” section where you can find the “Crop” entry.

Fig. 1: Crop in the Processing section

Fig. 1: Crop in the Processing section

Click the little grey button with the pencil to open the popover:

Fig. 2: The Crop popover in the General Info

Fig. 2: The Crop popover in the General Info

Crop Options

There are 3 tabs and therefore 2 crop options available:

  • Selecting “None” and clicking “Apply” will make sure to remove all crop settings from the selected clip.
  • Crop to an Aspect Ratio
  • Crop to a Custom Resolution

Crop to an Aspect Ratio

Fig.3

Select the second tab “Aspect Ratio” and enter a custom aspect ratio into the combo box or select one from the list of presets.

The by default available aspect ratios are:

  • 4:3
  • 16:9
  • 1.85:1
  • 2.39:1 (Cinemascope)
  • 2:1
  • 5:3 (1.66:1)

Crop to a Custom Resolution

Fig.4

Select the third tab “Custom Resolution”.

The following controls are available:

  1. Size: You can enter a custom pixel resolution to crop to. The specified pixel resolution will be cropped out by default from the center of the image.
  2. Aspect Lock: You can lock the resolution to a certain ratio when changing horizontal or vertical size.
  3. Recents: The gear menu shows recently used sizes for a quick selection
  4. Offset: Specify a horizontal and vertical offset from the center cropped size
  5. Quick Offset Buttons & Re-Center: The quick offset arrow keys enable a one-click shift of the cropped area to the respective image margins. If an offset is entered the “0” button appears and helps to remove the offset to re-center the cropped area.
  6. px/% Switch: You can switch between specifying an custom crop resolution in pixels or percentage values.

Click “Apply” to crop the current image to the specified crop.

Source and Resulting Resolution

The “Source Resolution” and “Resulting Resolution” give you information about the original and the resulting image resolution:

  • “Source Resolution”: Native resolution of the clip. Also displayed in the General Info in the right tab under “Format -> Resolution”
  • “Resulting Resolution”: The cropped and/or desqueezed resolution.
    • The factors relevant for the calculation of the Resulting Resolution are displayed below (e.g. “Desqueeze (2.0) and Crop”).
    • The resulting percentage of the original image is displayed in brackets. The resulting aspect ratio follows.

Please be aware that the decoding resolutions of the player do not affect the calculations of resolutions in the “Crop” popover.

Highlighting of Cropped Area in the Playback View

While setting the crop in the popover the area that will be cropped is highlighted in the playback view and updates live while changing crop settings.

Fig 5: The crop area shows in the image

 

Apply Crop to Multiple Clips

To apply a crop to two or more clips select multiple clips from the table view and open the “Crop” popover:

Fig. 6: Multi edit for crop

Fig. 6: Multi edit for crop

 

The number of altered clips is displayed in the popover (see “Will edit 4 Clips” in Fig. 6) . Click “Apply” to apply the set crop factor to all selected clips.

 

Tags: crop, multi edit, multiedit, aspect ratio, custom resolution