What's a good free Windows video editor that crops out data in the MP4 video frame?

On 9/28/2017 3:31 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Neil
writes:
[]
Quite frankly, your time must not be worth much to avoid the cost of
that program. This topic alone would have paid for it a few times
overÂ* at my rate.

To save others wondering: as far as I can tell from the above page,
it'sÂ* $40. And that's a yearly fee, not an outright price.

To save even more wondering, you have to go a few pages deeper to
actually purchase the program, and one option is a lifetime license
charge of $59.99US for use on one PC. It is an "outright price" that I
paid a couple of years ago and I get regular updates for free.

https://filmora.wondershare.com/shop/buy/buy-video-editor.html

Ah, sorry. I found the site far from easy to navigate (for a start, it
doesn't render properly in my preferred browser).
[]
Spend your time however you wish, but if one asks for a solution and
one is provided, it might be a good investment to at least check it out.

Well, I and (I think) the OP would consider $60 more than we'd want to
shell out for occasional or (I think he might have said it was) a
one-off need.

Your mention of "at my rate" suggests you're looking at this as a
professional rather than personal task - or, you price your private time
the same as your professional time. That latter is a personal choice,
which I've often thought of following, but I often can't bring myself to
do so (in this case spend $60). If I was doing it as part of
professional employment, I might thing differently.

Anything that consumes my time is a cost, regardless of whether I'm
compensated for it. Spending unlimited time searching for "free"
options, learning how to use them, discovering that they won't do what
you wanted after all, rinse and repeat.

A wise friend once told me, "Money comes and goes; time only goes!"

--
best regards,

Neil

He who is Neil said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:16:15 -0400:

Filmora does more than programs that I used with earlier versions of
Windows and Mac (Avid, for one) at less than 5% of their cost.

Filmora looks great! It seems to be perfect payware for the job, especially
as it seems to "follow" the faces as they move across the screen (which
isn't needed in this particular application but which is a nice to have
feature).

Thank you very much for suggesting the Filmora tools as they show:
a. The job can be done
b. How the job can be done
c. And at what cost ($60)

Spend your time however you wish, but if one asks for a solution and one
is provided, it might be a good investment to at least check it out.

I am not sure what you mean by "check it out" because:
a. Payware isn't free
b. Freeware isn't free

The cost of freeware is that the knowledge of the best tools is an expense
that doesn't just come to you for free. Like any knowledge (e.g., knowledge
of chemistry, physics, politics, psychology, etc.) you can't just "pay for
the knowledge". You have to ask pertinent questions and run pertinent labs.

In all the sciences, labs are critical.
But labs cost time.

Testing out freeware (or payware for that matter) costs time.
There's no way around it other than to ask for an expert who has done it
who can save you time.

In some cases, the expert might say that the freeware sucks so badly that
the *only* way to get the job done is with payware - but - in my decades in
Usenet, I have never once NOT found freeware that did the job that payware
does.

Hence, I'm confident that we will find an easy-to-use well-documented
freeware solution that is, in the end, far more useful to the group as a
whole, than is the suggestion to use a particular payware.

EVERYONE can INSTANTLY benefit from the freeware solution.
Only some will benefit from a payware solution.

Both have their merits, since, as I said, neither freeware nor payware is
actually free. Both have a cost/benefit ratio, which isn't only measured in
dollars or minutes but which includes dollars, minutes, QOR, leverage,
personal satisfaction, reuse, etc. as part of the correct complete
equation.

Just like I get benefits from being able to properly repair and balance a
punctured tire at home in about 15 minutes, the cost of being able to do
that included not only the $300 in tools but in the immense knowledge that
I gained in researching HOW to do it (and in fixing/replacing/balancing
about 25 tires/wheels to date).

Gaining knowledge is expensive - but can be leveraged to the entire
newsgroup far better than payware can be leveraged to that same huge
audience.

See knowledge gained, for example, at:
"I broke down and bought the Harbor Freight Pittsburgh Bead Breaker"
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.home.repair/ZerL-eG7GlQ/3Zby5OK-CgAJ

Knowledge isn't gained for free.

He who is J. P. Gilliver (John) said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:31:39 +0100:

Well, I and (I think) the OP would consider $60 more than we'd want to
shell out for occasional or (I think he might have said it was) a
one-off need.

Yes. It's a one-time need (but knowledge is reusable!).

All I want to do is post a video of my WiFI signal strength over time, but
without the BSSID/SSID privacy leaks: http://i64.tinypic.com/27xi5hf.jpg

Your mention of "at my rate" suggests you're looking at this as a
professional rather than personal task - or, you price your private time
the same as your professional time.

Payware isn't free; freeware isn't free.
The knowledge needed to run the best freeware to do all jobs needed is
expensive in terms of time - just as my knowledge of decibels and calculus
was expensive - but knowledge can be re-used - just as I recently used my
knowledge to set up a Wi-Fi access point that can feed my Internet to my
neighbor who can literally be miles away line of sight, and I set up a
Wi-Fi station that can grab his Internet from miles away LOS.

Knowledge isn't free.
But knowledge can be leveraged.

Just like I leveraged that WiFi knowledge here yesterday:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.home.repair/Y6bIYqeZ3qk/1N8md8BBCAAJ

That's what we're doing here.

Leveraging our combined tribal knowledge so that *anyone* can get the job
done, and not just those willing to shell out $60 for what amounts to a
one-time personal need.

That latter is a personal choice,
which I've often thought of following, but I often can't bring myself to
do so (in this case spend $60). If I was doing it as part of
professional employment, I might thing differently.

Just as in repairing and mounting and balancing your own tires would be an
entirely different equation if your vehicle was a work vehicle than if you
do it in your spare time, the same is true here.

Everything is different for the cost/benefit tradeoff calculations if
you're doing a job versus if you're just some guy in his pajamas wanting to
obscure his BSSID on a video he created on his Android phone to show
someone else how a wifi signal-strength app works over a period of time.

Business decisions rarely leverage to free portable solutions for everyone;
but in this case, the tribal effort involved will almost certainly result
in an easy-to-implement solution that everyone can use at any time.

At the moment, the most likely suggested solution is Shotcut freeware,
using either the blur-selected-area approach or the cover-with-opaque-block
approach, both of which seem easily enough implemented from the videos I've
seen so far.

He who is Neil said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:53:49 -0400:

Anything that consumes my time is a cost, regardless of whether I'm
compensated for it. Spending unlimited time searching for "free"
options, learning how to use them, discovering that they won't do what
you wanted after all, rinse and repeat.

A wise friend once told me, "Money comes and goes; time only goes!"

By that single-minded argument, you expending any time to learn something
(e.g., chemistry or physics or politics or mathematics, etc., "is a cost",
regardless of whether you're compensated for it.

Yet, the knowledge gained at the cost of time & effort, isn't useless.

If you already think you know everything there is to know, then yes, any
further time spent learning is wasted on you. But I don't think you really
think the way you just said you think.

IMHO, you can disagree with my next assertion, but I can tell you I have a
vast amount of knowledge which didn't come for free.

While I have ivy-league credentials just like many of you do, that
knowledge didn't only come at a monetary cost. That knowledge buildup has
been a life-long endeavor of mine.

The result are everywhere in my life, e.g., the fact I retired at a very
young age, but the results are also that there is likely nothing that I
have ever endeavored to do on a computer that I didn't find a freeware
solution that did it.

What's that knowledge worth to me?
Not much. A few thousand dollars at best.

But what's that knowledge worth if I can leverage it to tens of thousands
of people every day.

A lot more.

Methinks you're just looking at the problem from a more narrow-minded
standpoint, since I think we have, at the expense of a few Usenet posts,
found a potentially viable solution in Shotcut already.

I do thank you for the suggestion of the payware though, as we can always
learn a lot by comparing the freeware functionality to the payware
functionality for this one-time volunteer effort to help someone on Usenet
understand the Android capability of WiFI recording of signal strength over
time.

On 09/28/2017 12:05 PM, harry newton wrote:
He who is Big Al said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 10:49:08 -0400:

I did a lot of editing years ago with a paid version (yes I know, the
OP wanted free, but..) of Magix Movie Maker in Win7 or 8(?).Â* It
allowed multiple video layers (as well as audio).Â*Â* It had no ability
to edit the video as you want, but I would think you might be able to
make a transparent PNG image of a black rectangle(s) and put it in a
2nd video track or overlay or whatever the programs term is.Â*Â* It
would be an engineering feat to get the black spots to fit in one PNG
but...

I've used Avidemux lately but only to convert formats, trim and
brightness levels.

One of the two great advantages of Payware is that Payware tells you the
possibilities of what can be done with freeware. The second great advantage
of Payware is that it gives you a *technique* for solving the problem (and
usually lots of good search keywords).

So this overlaying of a black PNG rectangle technology makes sense for the
task of blocking out or blurring out certain areas of a video.
But would only be successful if the video does not move around on the
screen. Or at least much, as you could reposition the PNG now and
then but you'd like it to be as simple as possible.

On 28/09/2017 20:07, harry newton wrote:
He who is newshound said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 19:03:54 +0100:

I'm currently using Shotcut (for simpler things than that) and am
pretty impressed. I *think* I have seen this done on one of their demo
videos where they applied stabilisation to a hand-held "interview"
type of thing, then used cropping to get rid of the blurry edges.

I saw Shotcut listed in one of the Google finds, but that's my sum total of
experience with Shotcut.
Googling specificaly for Shotcut, I find two possible "canonical"
locations, which generally means something fishy is going on:
https://www.shotcut.org/download/
https://www.shotcutapp.com/download/

But both seem to be "the same page" so I will not dig into the domains to
see if they geolocate similarly.
Looking at the full list of features, I don't see what we're looking for:
https://www.shotcut.org/features/

Oh sorry, it must have been one of the others which I was looking at.
Avidemux? I am *really* impressed by Shotcut, though.

But the ability to "face blur" may still be there somewhere and the fact
it's open source and cross platform is a huge plus as it vastly reduces
both the risk of freeware at the same time it potentially increases the
flexibility over proprietary solutions.
At the moment, Shotcut is the primary freeware program to investigate to
determine if and how it can "blur or block selected areas" in an
Android-created MP4 video clip.

Don't have time ATM to read the other responses, but will look forward
to doing so having had the same grief after my paid-for editor
(Pinnacle) turned out to be unsupported by W10.

Thank you for mentioning that about Pinnacle because I bought, long ago, a
boxed set of Pinnacle Studio 9 (I think) which is somewhere in my attic,
where I was wondering if it would work with both MP4 and Windows 10 (and
where I doubt it does).
You've given me more reason not to look for it.

My good deed for the day!


Also lost access to Movie Maker when I had to do a full reinstall of
W10 from scratch, and *really* did not fancy all the registry tweaks
that are said to be needed to get it back.

I was also wondering about the Windows "freeware" (technically not free,
but at no additional cost), so again you're helping us decide what NOT to
try, since 95% of the freeware expense is wasted in trying the solutions
that never stood a chance of working.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for MS to offer a replacement for
Movie Maker. I'm just relieved that they decided to keep Paint available
because, crude though it is, it is convenient for some stuff (and good
at doing file conversion). Paint 3D seems to be an order of magnitude
more complex.

On 28/09/2017 19:05, Neil wrote:
On 9/28/2017 1:42 PM, harry newton wrote:

see if freeware Windows programs have this "face-off" feature set.

Well, good luck with all of that. I've used the "paid" version of
Filmora with Win10 for a couple of years, and can tell you that it is
capable of the task in more than one way. I mentioned the simplest.
Quite frankly, your time must not be worth much to avoid the cost of
that program. This topic alone would have paid for it a few times over
at my rate.


I'm not against paying for software. Based on good reviews and in spite
of my limited requirement for video editing, I bought Pinnacle in Win7
or Win8 days, and put some effort into learning the user interface. So I
was not best pleased to find my version not supported by Win10. I
wouldn't have objected to a modest update fee but Pinnacle's attitude
was "Stuff you".

And it wasn't as good as Shotcut.

On 28/09/2017 20:25, harry newton wrote:
He who is newshound said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 19:03:54 +0100:
I'm currently using Shotcut (for simpler things than that) and am
pretty impressed. I *think* I have seen this done on one of their demo
videos where they applied stabilisation to a hand-held "interview"
type of thing, then used cropping to get rid of the blurry edges.

If Shotcut can handle MP4, I think this suggestion moves it to the top!
https://www.shotcut.org/features/

Googling we find more than what was found on the canonical Shotcut site:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tutorial+shotcut+blur+face+-filmora

- How to Blur a Video - Shotcut Tutorial
http://gadoga.com/en/how-to-blur-sensor-video-shotcut-tutorial.html

This tutorial shows two ways, a blur, and a text block overlay:
- How to Blur & Obscure Part of an image with Shotcut
https://youtu.be/VErftj1fUHs

This tutorial explains the method a bit deeper:
https://plus.google.com/+JamesWoo/posts/ht9mvmRDs6r
"Shotcut does not have a blur filter per se, but this workaround achieves a
similar result. This is used if you want to blur some text (eg off a number
plate, t-shirt) or someone's face, when you have already recorded a video,
and there's no way of re-shooting the video."

Note that other solutions were found in that search, where, as is often the
case with freeware, multiple best-in-class solutions are cascaded:
How to blur faces in video
http://www.tinkernut.com/2010/02/how-to-blur-faces-in-videos/
Where that tutorial utilized the following softwa
http://www.formatoz.com
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
http://www.debugmode.com/wax
http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

I don't know yet if Shotcut can handle MP4, but if it does, it seems pretty
clear that Shotcut is, so far, the best and easiest suggested way to
blur/obscure a selected area in an MP4 video using existent Windows
freeware.

It's certainly fine with MP4. Here's one I made earlier. MP4 from a
Canon Legria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPHwPgHuRfo

On 9/28/2017 4:23 PM, harry newton wrote:
He who is Neil said on Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:53:49 -0400:

Anything that consumes my time is a cost, regardless of whether I'm
compensated for it. Spending unlimited time searching for "free"
options, learning how to use them, discovering that they won't do what
you wanted after all, rinse and repeat.

A wise friend once told me, "Money comes and goes; time only goes!"

By that single-minded argument, you expending any time to learn something
(e.g., chemistry or physics or politics or mathematics, etc., "is a cost",
regardless of whether you're compensated for it.

Yet, the knowledge gained at the cost of time & effort, isn't useless.

Education always costs. That doesn't mean that the cost isn't of value
well beyond the investment; the two are not related in that manner.

If you already think you know everything there is to know, then yes, any
further time spent learning is wasted on you. But I don't think you really
think the way you just said you think.

I really do, you just misinterpreted it by conflating cost and value.
Since time is of greater value to me than money, that is what I try not
to waste.

As for "knowing everything there is to know", I'll be the first to tell
you that my knowledge represents a fairly small portion of even a modest
library. I don't have any problem with that.

--
best regards,

Neil

On 9/28/2017 4:46 PM, newshound wrote:
On 28/09/2017 19:05, Neil wrote:
On 9/28/2017 1:42 PM, harry newton wrote:

see if freeware Windows programs have this "face-off" feature set.
*
Well, good luck with all of that. I've used the "paid" version of
Filmora with Win10 for a couple of years, and can tell you that it is
capable of the task in more than one way. I mentioned the simplest.
Quite frankly, your time must not be worth much to avoid the cost of
that program. This topic alone would have paid for it a few times over
at my rate.


I'm not against paying for software. Based on good reviews and in spite
of my limited requirement for video editing, I bought Pinnacle in Win7
or Win8 days, and put some effort into learning the user interface. So I
was not best pleased to find my version not supported by Win10. I
wouldn't have objected to a modest update fee but Pinnacle's attitude
was "Stuff you".

And it wasn't as good as Shotcut.

There are many tools out there. I got similarly "nailed" by freeware
that worked for a few months then, without any mention of the
possibility on its website, it locked up unless I wanted to pay an
outrageous amount for "tech support". What a scam.

I don't know Shotcut, so I have no basis for comparison. I do know Avid,
Premiere, and other pro editors, and think that Filmora is as good or
better than they are in some respects with only a couple of areas where
the pro apps can do more. Well worth the money, IMO.

--
best regards,

Neil