The Mask of QuickTime
by David Battino
What do you do when your QuickTime movie has ugly artifacts around the borders? Use QuickTime Pro's unlikely Mask feature to slice ’em off. Here's how.
For the recent O'Reilly Digital Media feature on composing music for mobile games, author Peter Drescher sent several movies of expert gamer Lucas Finklestein playing on a T-Mobile Sidekick. Due to the camera position, though, the movies had enormous black borders. Not only did that look strange, the borders bloated the file size. (See Figure 1.)

Fig. 1: The original movie had big, ugly black borders, but QuickTime Pro's Crop command snips out time, not area. What to do?
15 Comments
| Stephen 2006-08-18 17:37:00 |
This was amazingly helpful. Thank you so much. |
| chris 2006-10-18 13:03:47 |
Thanks - was a good hint for me... |
| Jock 2007-01-19 03:11:53 |
I don't often leave comments but this little tip has saved me loads of time and money. I scoured the net and I think this is the only place that actually explains the technique properly.
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| djd 2007-02-15 21:36:48 |
Quite nice indeed... Been holding off on upgrading to Quicktime Pro for awhile but this was enough to make me pull the trigger. Thanks! |
| hux 2007-04-05 08:17:04 |
Thanks for the tip -- it's simple once you know how it works. Thanks again! |
| Paul T 2007-04-11 15:37:17 |
!!!!!! Cripes! I made some projects in iMovie DV instead of DV Widescreen, and I've been looking for hours to figure out how to crop out the black bars. Wow, this was simple, and perfect. I'm going to go buy an O'Reilly book of some kind to pay you back for this. Great! |
| Nathan 2007-04-14 17:05:16 |
Ok, thats a cool trick but now can I go the other way with it? I am making a movie in iMovie and iDVD but I have run into the TV safe area problem. Could I just add a black border around the whole movie effectivly shrinking the movie to with-in the TV safe area? THAT would solve my very stressfull situation as the DVD has to be ready in a just a few days! |
| David Battino 2007-04-14 18:28:47 |
Nathan: Try this, using a rectangle that's larger than your movie but with the same height-to-width ratio: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2006/09/29/two-slick-quicktime-tricks.html |
| David Battino 2007-04-14 21:20:53 |
Nathan (2): You might also check out the plugins at iMoviePlugins.com; Minify (just $2.50!) looks like it will do exactly what you need. |
| andintroducing 2007-06-03 15:00:13 |
The solution above sounds incredible.
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| David Battino 2007-06-03 22:43:00 |
@andintroducing: Thanks for asking. I see how Fig. 2 could be confusing. What you want to produce here is a black box with a white border, as seen in the bottom left hand corner of Fig. 3. It will look a bit like a film slide. (You can also make a white box with a black border and then hit the Invert button in QuickTime Player, but I digress.)
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| munish 2007-08-10 09:35:25 |
Thanks alot! I don't know why qt doesn't just have a cropping tool. Thanks for the help. |
| Beth 2007-09-26 08:27:27 |
Thanks - really helpful, followed the instructions using Photoshop to produce the GIF with no problems at all. Anyone who isn't used to using photoshop might want extra instruction:
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| Jason 2008-06-21 00:35:06 |
I tried this technique .... but I get white spots on the QuickTime movie after I complete the crop ? Any suggestions ? |
| DavidBattino 2008-06-21 13:31:33 |
@Jason:
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