Flix Cloud does cropping a bit differently than some other video compressors, so I thought I’d write a short post about it.

Boundaries, Not Pixel Subtraction

Cropping values in a Flix Cloud recipe define the boundaries of the area you want to retain in the cropped image, not the number of pixel rows to remove from the edges.

The input video file is your cropping “canvas,” so to speak. When thinking about your crop settings, imagine that you are defining a bounding box on top of the canvas, similar to the lasso tools used in graphics editors like Photoshop–you drag the lasso over the canvas to select a region of the canvas.

The point of origin (0 X axis, 0 Y axis) for this bounding box is the top left corner of the canvas.

All cropping values in Flix Cloud are relative to the point of origin (0,0).

Example

Let’s say your input videos are 720×400 but are letterboxed on the top and bottom to make their actual dimensions 720×540 for display on 4:3 aspect screens. Today, with 16:9 aspect becoming more popular, you want to crop off the excess black letterbox mattes to make the videos their true size, 720×400. This is how you would do it in Flix Cloud:

Crop Top: 70
Crop Left: none
Crop Right: none
Crop Bottom: 470

This sets the bounding box to start 70 pixels from the top of the image and extend down to 470 (540-70) pixels from the top, effectively cropping 70 pixels from the top and 70 pixels from the bottom of the video. Because we didn’t specify right and left values, they aren’t cropped.

I hope I’ve explained this clearly. If not, or if you have any other questions about Flix Cloud recipes, feel free to ask follow-ups in the comments.