http://www.muvipix.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=6733&p=60639#p60639
I showed that, by unchecking Scale to Frame Size for that particular image on the PRE Timeline, one could remove objecst at the edges without also experiencing the undesirable result (fewer pixels per inch and therefore less detail) that one gets with cropping.*
But what about a video that one has shot at the HDV setting (1440x1080) with, say, a Canon HV30 and that one has dropped onto a PRE Timeline with the Project Present HDV (1440x1080)? In this case, even if Scale to Frame Size was the default setting, unchecking it on a clip will accomplish nothing, the reason being that 1440x1080 is PRE7's native resolution for HD work.
One could, of course, crop the clip--and that, in fact, is what I do when the material at the edges of the frame is minimal. For example, for the clip that I am working on at this time, I needed to increase the Scale from 100.0 to only 103.5 to do away with the object (a tiny portion of an electric fan) at the edge of the frame--and this amount of cropping will cause negligible degradation of the image on my 52-inch HDTV.
But what if one needs to remove a lot more edge material without cropping/degrading the subject of one's frame? The most satisfactory method that I've discovered (the pros on this site doubtless know many more) is to use the Clip Video Effect. Simply drag the Clip effect onto the clip and--Volia!--one has eliminated edge objects to about the same extent as increasing the scale to 120%--but without any resulting cropping/degradation of the subject of the image.
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*This method assumes, of course, that one a) has chosen under Edit>Preferences in PRE to select Scale to Frame Size before dropping the stills onto the Timeline and b) the size of the stills, in pixels, is larger than the frames that one has chosen for one's Project Preset. For example, if one's stills for HD work are, as Steve suggests in his book on PRE7, 220A0x1235, then unchecking Scale to Frame Size is going to result in the edges of the still falling outside the 1920x1080 frame. Similarly, if one's stills for SD work are, as he suggests, 1000x750, then unchecking Scale to Frame size will result in it fallng outside a SD frame on the Timeline.
