Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 December 20

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December 20

Trying to find desktop video app or plug-in filter for echo pillarboxing aka stylized pillarboxing

I'd like to be able to convert 4:3 video into 16:9 video, but I don't want black pillarboxes, crop the video, or stretch the entire video. Basically, I wanna use the so-called echo aka stylized pillarboxing effect, as demonstrated visually in our article Pillarbox.

I don't wanna stack several tracks on top of each other in one of my existing NLEs, as that's a waste of tracks, efforts, and resources. All I want is a simple desktop tool (being on Windows 10 here) or plugin (especially for VirtualDub, but I also have Premiere Pro CS2 and Vegas Pro 14) that does that job where I'm putting a 4:3 image in and I'm getting an echo-pillarboxing version out of it on the other side, on a single click. It should also provide the following options:

• Being able to manually set the amount of blur.
• Being able to switch between blur, horizontal blur only, or vertical blur only.
• Being able to switch between stretching, zooming, or vertically splitting in the blurred parts in order to fill the pillarboxes.

Being able to quickly switch through those different functions with a few clicks would easily make me see which one would look the best for each clip. None of my NLEs has any simple way to do that, I can only stack tracks and add and throw away five or so different filters by means of drag-and-drop, which is rather unintuitive. Also:

• It should not be a $%&#-ing coding language such as AVIsynth or ffmpeg! I've never been able to ever make a single line of those darn video code languages work for close to 20 years by now. It should simply be something with a GUI, rather.

As said, I don't wanna clumsily waste tracks and a lot of work by trying to stack several tracks to do that in my NLE and then jiggle around with individual filters by means of drag-and-drop.

I know the task itself for what I'm looking for here must be so easy on the programming side that a free desktop tool should be available for this. But I've been googling for this for hours, and all I'm getting is:

• Hundreds of forum requests for this where confused people replying don't understand what echo aka stylized pillarboxing is, thus recommending either cropping, adding black pillarboxes, or stretching of the original video footage, instead of an actual echo-pillarboxing effect.
• People suggesting to stack tracks on top of each other and jiggle around with lots of drag-and-drop filters.
• People suggesting commercial software that can do a lot more than what I wanna do here.
• People suggesting cryptic coding languages such as ffmpeg and AVIsynth.

--2003:EF:1700:B472:7C9E:44FC:9833:47E0 (talk) 02:26, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps this post contains usable info. Otherwise, if your NLE allows you to collapse a stack of tracks into a single track of video, you might be able to use that.  --Lambiam 12:30, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

My initial request said "no programming code languages such as AVIsynth or ffmpeg. [...] It should simply be something with a GUI, rather." And now you're pointing me exactly to ffmpeg. --2003:DA:CF4F:CE00:A860:9E3C:E516:B72B (talk) 23:38, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I thought that when you wrote, "I've never been able to ever make a single line of those darn video code languages work", you meant that you had not been able to concoct the code that did what you wanted. Following a simple precooked example is another matter. Why shouldn't anyone be able to get that to work?  --Lambiam 13:09, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

One reason being that they keep changing the available commands with new updates, like, every few days, and then take a decade to document the changes, if ever. Then when you try to get help via forums or IRC, the pros condescendingly refuse to even just talk to you once they find out you're not using Linux. Then when you've been hounding them for weeks and weeks every single day on IRC, without a single response, one of them gracefully decides to write a finished BAT script for you, just to get you off their back. It's what I've been encountering with AVIsynth, ffmpeg, and Mencoder for two decades now. --2003:DA:CF08:9600:5C9:820E:59B3:B081 (talk) 14:28, 21 December 2020 (UTC)