Blender VSE cropping a video

Question

I am doing a full screen recording of my macbook pro at resolution 2880x1800. The actual content area of the screen that I would like to record is only about 2326x1380 pixels, that's an awkward number I know but there's a reason for it. I would like to use blender vse to crop this video down to a 16x9 aspect ratio so that was the closest 16x9 aspect ratio that I could crop out of the recorded area while getting everything that I needed in the video frame.

inside blender vse I setup the video properties like this:

it's a 1:1 aspect ratio with the resolution set to the size of the video. In the strip editor I add an image offset of -160 on the y position to get everything in frame.

this is a screengrab of part of the window:

As you can see there's still those's still pillow box black borders going on.

How can I change these settings to allow the full 16x9 aspect ratio w/o the borders?

Answer 1

That's because your actual screen ratio is 2880/1800 = 1,6. But your desired ratio of 16/9 is 1,7777 (periodic). This doesn't fit together. Blender (by default and there's no way to change that) does scale your input Video to fit into your Render Resolutions Aspect Ratio (I don't mean the Aspect Ratio Pixel size below the Resolution but the actual resulting ratio of your Resolution dividing width by height).
Because your ratio is off you'll get your black bars to the left and right because the rest is fit into the heigth of 1380 pixels which means that your original input should be 3200 pixels wide to fit into your 16:9 format. But as it isn't Blender aligns it horizontally centered and fills the remaining space with black color.

So you'd have to use the Image Crop function of your Strips Strip Input Properties panel in the VSE to precisely set the area that you'd like to cut off.