I shot a bunch of clips at 1920x1080 (16:9). To make the edit look more "cinematic", I've decided the output will be 1920x800 (21:9). However, I can't find a sensible workflow to do this in Kdenlive.

I've created a new project profile, changing the resolution to 1920x800 and the display aspect to 21/9 (didn't change the pixel aspect of 1/1). This makes the clip and project monitors 21:9, as expected. The clip monitor becomes pillarboxed (black bars at the sides) - fair enough.

However, when I drag a clip to the timeline, it also becomes pillarboxed. This implies the clip is scaled down to 800p. What I expected instead was to keep the native resolution but crop the top and/or the bottom - ideally, that when I drop the clip, it will start with a Crop effect applied that I could customise later (to decide which part of the top and bottom gets cropped).

I can "fix" this by adding the Position and Zoom effect to the clip in the timeline, setting the scale to 135% (== 1 + 1080/800) and adjusting the horizontal pan, but 1) this is too much manual work to do for every single clip, 2) there's no guarantee that the scaling down Kdenlive applies and the 135% scaling I apply will cancel out on render, and thus there may be some image quality loss (and wasted CPU cycles) caused by the two scales

Also tried playing with the aspect ratio in the clip properties, to no avail.

There probably is a much simpler way to do this, but I haven't been able to figure it out. Help!

Just click the "Distort" option in the effect you're using. I suggest you to use "Transform" than "Position and Zoom".

It's not that simple. Kdenlive behaves differently than expected in this respect. Because this scaling back and forth is illogical. It is also not the task of the video editor to tell the filmmaker what his footage should look like.

Just two things:

If you want to adjust the aspect ratio for a clip, you can override it in the clips properties.

But I guess, the original author was just looking for the LetterB0xed effect...

Hentrich wrote:Just two things:

If you want to adjust the aspect ratio for a clip, you can override it in the clips properties.

But I guess, the original author was just looking for the LetterB0xed effect...

Black bars may have some value under certain circumstances. But in general it's better to load all takes into CGG and cut them to the size of the Kdenlive project. This is possible in one go and saves a lot of hard work.

Stetsbequem wrote:... in general it's better to load all takes into CGG and cut them to the size of the Kdenlive project. This is possible in one go and saves a lot of hard work.

What is CGG?