[me]

I have an MPEG that I want to crop some scenes out, any way to do that without major work?

[lucylawless]

you can do rough cropping in quicktime pro, and fine cropping with quicktime 4 pro, but none of this will actually make your file smaller.

What I mean by the first part is that in QT 5 they disabled the menu commands for editing MPEG's (or any movies with partial MPEG tracks, as far as I can tell), but you can still select sections by eye-balling, and then drag and drop to simulate copy/paste

[tomra]

Hi.

Eh...where do you drag what.
By eye - balling...do you mean selecting with the ticker marks?

Thanks.
Tom.

[lucylawless]

yeah, the ticker marks
if you drag the picture of one movie onto another movie, it will paste the selection from the first movie right after the current position of the second movie (if the second movie is at the end, the dragged section will be pasted at the end)

[tomra]

Hi.

Thanks.
I`ve tried this a couple of times with mixed results.
Sometimes the playback comes to a stop as soon as it reaches the pasted movie and sometimes it works???

After "pasting"....should the tickers rest in "selected all" or should one put them in a "select none" position?
Or maybe that does`nt matter at all?

Tom.

[lucylawless]

well, I don't do this much, because it's not a very good editing method, but I've never had a problem with it. And I don't know what exactly you're asking now because it seems you start to ask about how the tickers will behave after dragging, then it sounds like you're asking what you should do with them after dragging. I'll try my best here....I'm usually joining two MPEG files together (note: the resulting file will be a QT movie with an MPEG track, not a legit MPEG file), so I have to manually select all of part 2, set part 1 to the end, drag part 2 onto part 1, and then save. After dragging, part 2 is still selected (so if the 2 parts are the same size, the second half of the movie is still selected).

As for the stopping, I've only seen something like that once, and it wasn't with MPEGs. I was encoding a simpsons episode in 3ivx (a well-bahaved quicktime codec, so there shouldn't be any trouble as with MPEG), and cutting out the detailed parts to encode at higher bitrates. When I pasted these together, they played fine, but if I saved the movie and then played it, Quicktime would crash when it played through the first transition, or if I tried to seek ahead of it. This happened on two different machines (both OS X, though). I got fed up and went to bed, and re-encoded the whole thing the next day and the problems were gone. So I guess the files became corrupt somehow. So what this means to you, I guess, is re-encode if possible, or try to fix the MPEG files with Rosetta or some Windows utility.

[tomra]

Hi.

Thanks for your reply, Lucylawless!
Been trying some more and it has mostly worked OK now.
Seems like the files causing problems is not playing properly before copy/paste in the first place.

My question about the ticker marks was concerning wherever i should save the "comped" movie with the tickers selecting all pasted files ( one ticker at each end of the final complete comp ) or if the tickers should rest at their starting point at the far left after pasting ( dragging ) the file(s)?!
Tried both and it does`nt seem to make a difference....probably just a weired idea that popped into my head

Thanks again for your help!

Tom.