Can the screen be cropped to and exported at a custom aspect ratio?

Question

I think I'm needing Premier to do something it's just not designed to do. What I need to do is to take five or six different screen and audio captures of the same event (a 3D virtual reality instructional session), each representing a different person's view of that event, assemble those in a split screen, synchronize them to the designated "main" capture's audio, delete the other audio tracks, and add CG title labeling each one. The effect is like looking at a display showing six security camera images. From what I can determine, it is possible to do those things in Premier.
However, what I then need to do is to crop out any extra space to the left and right of that split-screen image and export the file as a .mov with the aspect ratio produced by the cropping so that the videos are as large as possible and are not distorted from resizing them to fit the standard aspect ratio. Depending on the size of the screencaps, the resulting .mov might have nearly a 1:1 ratio. What is critical for this is that the video be as large as possible and the "black" space be as small as possible so that the person who comes in later to analyze these composite videos can see everything  as clearly as possible. I also need to crop on the fly; because these images aren't always captured at the same size, it is impossible to preset a size for the resulting video.
We've been using a screen capture tool to do this that works but is a pain; clips can only be moved and resized by mouse-drags, and the software has to import to and export from its own proprietary format, which is very slow. However, ever piece of "real" video editing software I've looked at only seems to export in TV or film aspect ratios. Quicktime Pro looked for a bit like the best bet, but it doesn't seem to be able to handle multiple audio tracks (which are necessary since I have to synchronize tracks by ear much of the time).
Is what I'm describing--exporting .mov files while preserving custom aspect ratios that are created by cropping during editing--something Premier can do? If so, would it be something fairly easy for complete novices to do?

Answer 1

medeamajic wrote:
On a Mac based system ScreenFlow might work best but on the PC side FRAPS might work best. You can do what you want to do with Premiere Pro once you record the screen capture. As Stephen_Spider mentioned you might need to crop and even resize the images. FRAPS can record at 1/4 the screen resolution and still have decent results. PP CS 5.5 can play several layers (6 PIPs) of the FRAPS codec at 1/4 resolution in realtime.
Thanks, but we cannot change the screen recording process. According to the study's protocols, the virtual world has to be full-screen or almost nearly so during the session, and that full screen has to be captured for analysis. Resizing the screen captures is not a problem (especially since I already said I'm doing that), but if you're saying that Premier can only play back up to six screen captures simultaneously if they're captured at 1/4 screen, then that's a deal-breaker right there.
By the way, here's approximately what each of the completed composite videos looks like:
Screencap 1
Screencap 2
Screencap 3
Screencap 4
Screencap 5
Screencap 6
Each screencaptures is resized to the largest consistent size that will fit into this format, and then the resulting video is cropped to the outside border. If there are only five screencaptures, I simply center the single one on the bottom on the "center line."
And, to be clear (though I've said this several times already), this is something that is already being done. We probably have more than 60 of these .mov files, each around 45 minutes long, with five or six synchronized screen captures in each. Frame rate etc. has not been any issue with these, and neither has playback of the .mov file from HD or DVD.
Message was edited by: singerm2