Cropping MPEG-1 files

I am having a terrible time cropping MPEG-1 in Compressor 1.2.1. I am exporting from Final Cut 4.2, and the preview window shows the cropping, but when I process the conversion, the final file has no cropping at all. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.

I think the "Crop" behavior in Compressor is described incorrectly in some parts of the manual. The key is given in the following statement from the Compressor User Manual:
"As you reduce the clip image by cropping it, the output image will be scaled up to fill the new output frame size. This effect is similar to zooming in on an image, which results in larger pixels and overall image degradation."
Thus, you can't produce what you might consider a true crop of the image. All you can do is matte with black bars, or zoom, or distort (or a combination of the above). Thus, for example, you can't output a cropped MPEG1 encoding that would result in a movie with dimensions of 320 x 180. This is because Compressor only supports MPEG1 in 320 x 240 or 352 x 240 sizes. A similar situation exists for MPEG2 and DV, they must conform to a set of fixed dimensions and aspect ratios.
The best you can probably do is to use a matte filter and then output what will appear to be a letterboxed movie in a 320 x 240 frame. You can then apply a mask in QuickTime that will remove the black bars so that during playback you will only see the active image area of the movie. Thus, you letterbox the image with a matte and then "crop" the black bars during display with a QuickTime mask. Or, you can just forget about applying the matte in Compressor and just mask the image with QuickTime.
However, with some codecs (like MPEG4 or H.264) you can use just about any aspect ratio and output dimension that you'd like. Thus, I suspect that with Final Cut Pro you could create a sequence that could be output into any aspect ratio that you desired as long as you handled the source video distortion and scaling yourself (and the latter could produce any form of rectangular crop that you desired). However, this would only work when you exported to a codec that allowed arbitrary dimensions so that you could restore the proper (non-distorted) aspect ratio to the image.<small><hr width="75%"><small>If this suggestion helps in any way, a confirmation or acknowledgment would be appreciated, since that would also help others who may be having the same difficulty. Do for others as you would have them help you.<center>Thanks for sharing, Waymen.</center></small>

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