hey, i wanna crop some of my vids. is there a freeware program that i can do that without compressing the file, keeping full quality!
I’d guess you could do this in the blender sequencer using 2.46 RC1 (or later.) Drop your clip on the timeline and add a transform to it, set your output to avi raw and at the desired rez and you should be good to go. Check out PapaSmurf’s excellent tute here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/VSE_Storyboards and apply some of the tricks he describes as appropriate to your desired goals.
Also, its likely that VirtualDub will do this, too - just not tried it there.
VirtualDub will do it, for sure. Just following these steps.
1- Load your video (Ctrl-O or File>Open video file…).
2- Go to Video>Filters and click on Add…
3- Select the null transform filter. This is a dummy filter that won’t really do any processing on the video file.
4- Back in the Filters window, go to Cropping… and crop the video as you want it.
5- Press OK and go to Video>Compression. To ensure that the processing doesn’t involve lossy compression, use Uncompressed RGB or lossless codecs like Huffyuv or MSU (in absolutely lossless mode).
6- Go to File>Save as AVI and wait for processing to finish.
7- DONE!
ok, thanks 4 the help.
it all works perfect till i saved it as an AVI, i aborted it coz the file was 5GB for 5 minuites of video. its a full movie of 2 hourse, the original fule was 1.1GB. how can it go bigger when i chose uncompressed rbg??
you can give pitivi a try, I was helping them out over ther http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Main_Page
still in devlopment but has some functionality.
the video is probably already compressed 
Can AVI’s go over 2GB? You may have to split it into several files.
Or use compression.
On NT-based systems (2000, xp, vista) and using NTFS as your file system you can have them much larger.
I routinely capture files (single/unsplit avi) that are in the 2-8 Gb range.
I would imagine other OSes (not 9x-based Windows ones) would have no problem as well. The limitation was really a combination of the older Windows and FAT16/FAT32 systems. So you should be able to have larger AVIs created in Linux, MacOS too, I would guess.
while we’re on the subject of cropping
I’ve clicked PAL 16:9 and still getting a 4:3 ratio in the renders. How can i render 16:9 anyone
Attachments
Render in 720x405, Pixel Aspect 1:1
Do i just type that in? 720x405 seems very small too. I think the film was shot on 1024x whatever. Would that effect the resolution?
oh I’m with ye now - the aspect ratio is 1:1 so just adjust pixel and line size. We shot in HD so gonna find out from the DP - no bother
The 5GB you saw might have been the projected file size, not the size of 5 minutes of video (unless the video file has some mad resolution).
Like others suggested, try compression. Try installing one of the lossless codecs I mentioned in step 5. The video will retain all of its quality, but it’ll be smaller (two thirds, or even half the size) than uncompressed RGB.
hey, i wanna crop some of my vids. is there a freeware program that i can do that without compressing the file, keeping full quality!
You can’t do it without compressing, because any editing video demands recompressing, and so with all media files=((
You can crop using VidCrop Pro. I am using and I like it:yes:
You can have uncompressed files, or lossless compression. Video editing is best done in one of those two formats, don’t want to compress twice!
full lossless compression is unreal, because you lose anything, when will do compression
lossless compression is original file=)))
No, lossless compression is where you compress the file without losing any information. Few files are at maximum compression initially, and the limit is defined by information theory.
For instance, the number 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 can be written in less space as 10^50, without losing any information.
Everything loses some information during compression. Zip any file a few hundred times, it will be worse than the original. I know it sounds dumb because no one will do that, but it happens. mp3’s are bad to try and zip. I noticed a quality difference after about 15 zips (i just did it to see if it was true 
).
Nope, assuming no errors during the compression-decompression cycle, no loss should occur. (See wikipedia.)
Zipping MP3s is not the best test for this, as MP3s are already compressed with a lossy algorithm. Its likely that you’re encountering either errors in your zip app, or some other issue related to MP3 compression. Try it with a regular data file (like a .txt or an .exe) and check your file sizes before and after each iteration. No loss should occur with Zip.
I know, heres a better example:
Covert a file from wma to mp3 a few times, it gets crappy. I realize zipping mp3’s (or jpegs, gifs, etc) is stupid because they are already compressed, I guess it was a really stupid example 