How simply to "black-out" a news crawl

[laserfan]

I recorded a TV show off-the-air that for some (annoying) seconds placed a crawl across the bottom that I want to mask-out (make black). Had the station RESIZED the video i.e. compressed it vertically I'd know how to crop-and-resize, but they didn't do that so I just need to cover the crawl with black, which will be less distracting than having to read about the Digital TV conversion!!! :(

Can someone please point me in the right direction re: covering some number of the bottom pixels of my 1080 frame (full width) with black, leaving it at 1080? I have to believe this is (relatively) easy to do but I've searched & searched and must not be using the right search terms. :o

I intend to re-encode this MPEG2 program with x264.

[martino]

Overlay()ing a BlankClip()/Blackness() over the area should do the trick, although it may look rather ugly since there won't be any smoothing around it.

[squid_80]

Letterbox().

[laserfan]

After noodling Overlay() for a bit and doing some more nosing-around, I think I found a very easy way, which is simply to Crop the bottom off the frame and then AddBorders to replace the cropped portion:

Crop(0,0,-0,-90)
AddBorders(0,0,0,90)

I don't know why I couldn't think of this up-front; not enough coffee this morning I guess. Thanks for the replies folks, I appreciate it. :)

P.s. Looks like Letterbox does the same thing...

[laserfan]

This looks like it will work, and I especially like that I don't have to chop-up the video to apply the filter! Thanks again...

ApplyRange(97416,99413,"Letterbox",0,90,0)