Crop letterbox bars in QuickTime Pro

You can use QuickTime Pro and an image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, to crop letterbox bars from videos shot at a 16:9 aspect ratio but encoded at 4:3. Letterboxing refers to placing black bars at the top and bottom of widescreen videos to make them fit into the boxier standard screen aspect ratio without stretching the media (as a side note, videos can also be pillar-boxed, which refers to adding bars to the sides of 4:3 videos to fit better in a 16:9 media player).

Example of video before and after cropping letterbox bars

You and your clients may not be bothered by, or even prefer, letterbox bars. But you would like your videos to fill the entire media player, then follow the instructions below.

Removing the bars using QuickTime Pro

QuickTime Pro does not have a built-in cropping feature, but you can still use QuickTime Pro and Adobe Photoshop to crop out letterbox bars in a few steps.

1. Open the you want to crop in QuickTime and select File > Export > Movie to Picture to create an image of the playback area:


 

2. Locate and open this image file in Photoshop; the file appears on your desktop as either “Picture1.png” or the filename followed by .pct



3. Using the rectangular marquee tool, select the video frame area and cut to clipboard





4. Select the picture area with the rectangular marquee tool and use the paint bucket tool to fill this area with white
5. Use Shift-Command-I to invert and select the letterbox bars
6. Use the paint bucket tool to fill these with black



7. Select File > Save for Web
8. Select GIF from the filetype menu, and 2 from the color menu
9. Make sure to deselect the box labeled Transparency click Save



10. Return to your open file in QuickTime and select Window > Show Movie Properties
11. Select the video track in the table list:



12. Click Visual Settings and click Choose . . . in the mask box
13. Select the GIF file you just created in Photoshop and click Invert to apply the mask
14. All white borders will be cropped away leaving a file without the letterbox



15. From the QuickTime menu, select Window > Show Movie Inspector
16. Note the dimensions in the current size field (640×360 in the example below) and close the movie inspector



17. Select File > Export and enter the new dimensions in the size fields
18. Click OK



19. Set the other export options (bitrate, keyframes, etc.) so that they are identical to the pre-cropped file and click Save