Blacken Borders Filter improvement suggestion

[Norbert]

When selecting "Blacken Borders" filter, one has to put in the number of pixels of which the left, right, upper or bottom borders shall be set to black. If a user doesn't have the correct number at hand, he needs to find that out using some indirect way - e. g. using the "Crop" filter as a test where the interface allows to put in data as left, right, upper or bottom as well but simultaneously shows the content of the currently active frame so one can do test inputs and immediately can see the effect on the output.

The user can take the result from Crop filter testing and use that as input value for the Blacken Borders filter, however this means a couple of steps more to do than it could be.

Even better of course would be a graphic input facility where one could drag the mouse of a border over the frame content until it fits the user's purpose.

I'm using ADM 2.6.12 om Windows 7 or Windows 10 respectively.

[Jan Gruuthuse]

So you would like a similar visual control, mechanism as in crop filter to set blacken borders.

Perhaps developer(s) could/would find a timeslot to implement this, you know time is the big problem, so maybe someday ...

[Norbert]

Yes Jan, I'd like an interface similar to that.

The same thoughts apply to the "Black" filter where one can replace a section by black by the way.

I appreciate all the work and time that the developers spend for the ADM project. I'm glad the software is available, and I use it daily thankfully. I don't want appear to be demanding in any way of course, the idea is just to write down what I'd think would be worth considering as an improvement, if and whenever there may be time available for that.

[AQUAR]

Can't you just simply increment the pixel count: up - down - left - right until you get the borders as desired by looking at the preview?
A slider in the preview might by slightly quicker/refined but personally I find the current setup for this filter okay. 

[Norbert]

Can't you just simply increment the pixel count: up - down - left - right until you get the borders as desired by looking at the preview?
A slider in the preview might by slightly quicker/refined but personally I find the current setup for this filter okay.

Well... when the Blacken Borders window is open where I can put values in, I have to klick ok first before I can see the preview window and see the effect of my input. Then when I want to change the first trial I have to close the preview window and open the Blacken Borders input window again. This likely needs to be repeated several times in a row until the proper value (it is one border to blacken only as a rule rather than every for sides) is finally found. In comparison to that, using the crop filter for measurement first would be much faster because it would give me the opportunity to find the correct value in one step. Or have I missed a way in the Blacken Borders dialog to change the values by incrementing them while seeing the changes' effect immediately?

Even if I would follow this approach I'd have a hard time to find the right value quite often - consider a film sent by a tv station where there is the station logo in a black section which is above the top of but relatively close to the film picture info (some films produced in a broad cinema format sent via TV 16:9 or 4:3 or similar often leaves black sections above and below, and sometimes I'm lucky the tv station stets their logo therein) - I need to be careful not to blacken actual film information away by setting the top border at too high a value.

[AQUAR]

I don't disagree with what you are saying.
It's just that it takes under 30 sec with decreasing trial and error on subsequent adjustments.
Its not hard to make a near good first guess based on the proportion of the DAR that needs blackening.

The ADM development team will take note of your suggestion and may well in due course refine the process.