Easy/free way to edit dash cam video

Soldato
Joined
12 Apr 2007
Posts
12,795
Dunno if this is the right place to ask but I have an mp4 dash cam video but I'm struggling to remove the baked in telemetry info subtitles at the bottom with the dash cam software.

Is there an easy way to just crop the bottom of the screen or black out the text?

I don't really care about maintaining aspect ratio or anything like that.. I just want make it anonymous-ish.

Is this something I can do in windows 10, or is there some freeware or something that can do this?

Thanks
 
I can't seem to do it in windows, it asks me to download an app called 'clip champ' if I click 'edit' in windows media player, and directs me to the microsoft online shop, and asks me to sign into a microsoft account :rolleyes:
 
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If it is just simple cropping you need, Handbrake will do it.

Going to dob someone in whilst hiding your speeding offence? :D
 
VirtualDub (2) can do basic cropping without too much effort though you do need to work through a few steps to setup the input and output options.

Going to dob someone in whilst hiding your speeding offence?
:D

Easy enough to work out speed still unless the video is seriously fudged - there are AI plugins now which can extract fairly accurate speed information of objects or the camera even from videos which are manipulated to make it harder to calculate.
 
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If it is just simple cropping you need, Handbrake will do it.

Going to dob someone in whilst hiding your speeding offence? :D

Not at all, I was doing 7mph acording to my dash cam.

But I almost turned this idiot into pavement pizza, riding an E-thing, on the pavement, across a junction, the wrong way, down a one way street.

The still shot doesnt really show how fast he was going though, I reckon at least 20mph on the pavement.

I'm glad I have a dash cam though.. this could have ended very badly for him.

 
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ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=w:h:x:y" -c:v libx264 -crf 17 -c:a copy ouput.mp4

Replace w and h with the width and height of what you want the cropped size to be. So if it is a 1920x1080 video and you want to crop the bottom 100 pixels off, w would be 1920 and h would be 980.

Replace x and y with the horizontal and vertical pixel coordinates of where you want the crop top top left start point. So to make the 1920x980 box start at the top left corner x would be 0 and y would be 0. So these four values together would effectively crop just the bottom 100 pixels off.

Replace input and output with the names of the input file and the output filename you want.

Adjust 17 after -crf to change the size of the compressed video. Larger numbers=smaller file. 17 is basically lossless.

Google ffmpeg to download it and set it up in your path, then do the command from a dos prompt.

With it being a dos command it would be easy to make this a batch file to process multiple videos one after another if they all want 100 pixels cropping off the bottom.
 
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