How to Crop Video from the Desktop App Window

ManyCam Help
1

Hi.
Question: Is it possible to crop the video of a desktop app window?

Myself, I’m running google slides on Firefox within ManyCam. Google Slide is taking up the entire background for Manycam.
I’d like to crop Firefox’s browser menu and Google Slides control bar. I believe you can do this in OBS.
is this possible in ManyCam?

I would use desktop area (for cropping)…but it appears that the video is more pixellated than using the Desktop App Window option. Can someone confirm this?

Thanks

I’m on a Mac Mojave 10.14.6 using ManyCam 6.7.0.4, video size is 480p

2

Hey @Graham_Anderson,

Welcome to the community. You might be getting the pixelated image due to low resolution (480p), try increasing the resolution to 1080p. I couldn’t replicate the issue on our machines - there’s no visible difference between App window and Custom area in terms of image quality. Can you post screenshots to illustrate the difference?

There is no crop feature yet, but there’s a suggestion to add this feature, you can upvote it here.

3

Hi @Graham_Anderson,

You can zoom in util the menu disappears. After zooming you can use mouse to move “cropped” area.

5

Question:
If you’re using the app window (instead of desktop screen capture)…
When you zoom, are you losing pixel resolution…basically, is image/video being enlarged?

In my case, I’m streaming at 480p…so I’m trying to keep the graphics as sharp as possible before they get mangled by live streaming bitrates :slight_smile:

6

Thank you. In my case, I’m stuck with a final 480p stream…and still learning my way around ManyCam. I’m assuming 1080 won’t do me any good as the final output (to client) is 480p. Perhaps, that’s not the case?

Also, I re-compared OBS with ManyCam…and the resolution is roughly the same.

Question: Are there any resolution differences b/w graphics in an App Window (Google Slides running in Safari) and embedding graphics directly within ManyCam?

Thanks

7

@Graham_Anderson,
When you capture App Window, the image might be re-scaled to fit in the resolution selected in ManyCam. In your case, If your app window occupies an area greater than 640x480 pixels, ManyCam will capture and down-scale it to 640x480. Re-scaling will cause some quality loss.

Regarding the 1080p, if the output is 480p, it’s better keep it 480p in ManyCam as well to avoid down-scaling.

8

When zooming in, the image is being enlarged, so you’ll lose the pixel resolution as a result.

1 Like
9

to crop video on a Windows desktop app, you can try VLC, Joyoshare Media Cutter or HandBrake. Easy crop and high quality!