I'm looking for a utility that will easily allow me to quickly encode sequences from my Avid to H264 or MPEG-1.

The thing is: a lot of my content is either 1.85:1 within a 4x3 frame or 2.35:1 within a 16x9 frame. When exporting those, I don't want any black bars anywhere, and I often need to crop off a little left and right to exclude out-of-safety elements.

It would be great if it had a normalise option for sound, but that would be optional for me.

Unfortunately, the Avid won't allow you to set an encoding "zone" in the picture. I would love it if it did that, but I doubt it will ever happen.

I've tried to use ProCoder, Squeeze and Cleaner, all of which are hopelessly complicated. It took me hours to find the right settings, and the whole aspect ratio conversion was always hell to figure out, if I ever got it to work at all. That may very well be operator limitation, but I was just wondering if there's any app that is basically no more than QT Pro with an option to crop a source file to a destination size.

Any tips appreciated.

 I suggest that you give Procoder another try. It has all the features you listed and is really not that complicated. You just have to play with it for a while and it all is going to make sense.

I use MPEG Streamclip, which opens up reference files and other .mov's and allows you to export them to various formats. You can also do frame cropping on output. There's no sound normalization, but the video settings are relatively simple. The best thing: it's free!

Hope this helps!

-Jeff

Thanks. ProCoder and I were not friends. For instance, when there was a 16x9 anamorphic source without the widescreen flag, I found it hard to simply correct the AR, then crop for a result without black bars. I'm going to give it another look, though.

MPEG Streamclip looks interesting, but it does not seem to have an easy way to crop out a selection, other than by entering the numbers. That means a lot of trial and error. I'd prefer a tool that will quickly show me what the result of the croppings and scalings will be

True, it is pixel based, so therefore trial and error. However, because you can mark in/out on the timeline of Streamclip, you can select a short segment (a few frames) of the movie that will render in seconds for the trials. Just pick an area with good contrast to the black bars so you can easily see what needs to be cropped.

Once you have the pixel dimensions figured out for a given size (such as 16x9 in a 4x3) you should be able to use those exact same dimensions on other like sizes in the future.

Hope this helps!

-Jeff