Thanks. That was a big help. Is there a way to crop where the box outlining the crop doesn't always reduce the width and the length at the same time? For my purposes I would like to reduce only the width.

To make two videos fit side by side and fill the screen, use Pan/Crop to crop the videos into tall rectangles, then use Track Motion to position them -- one on the left half of the screen and one on the right half of the screen. You will need to have the two videos on separate tracks to do this. And this is much easier if you can dedicate those two tracks to the "side by side" effect.

Open the Pan/Crop window and look at the icons arranged vertically along the left edge of the window. The third icon from the bottom -- a blue rectangle in the upper left corner of a gray rectangle -- is the "Lock Aspect Ratio" button. Toggle this button OFF and now the Pan/Crop tool will let you create a rectangle of any proportion -- it won't have to match the original shape.

Manually type values in for the Width and Height in the top two entry values (under "Position").

For standard definition NTSC video (USA) type "360" for width and "480" for height.

For standard definition PAL video (most of the world outside of North America and western South America) type "360" for width and "576" for height.

For "Full HD" 1920x1080 video, type "960" for width and "1080" for height.

For HDV video, type "720" for width and "1080" for height.

Now that you have video cropped to take up half a screen width, close the Pan/Crop window and locate the "Track Motion" icon at the start of the track. It looks like a small blue rectangle to the lower right of a big white rectangle. Click this icon and a Track Motion window opens. You can grab the "box" in the window and drag it to the left to move your cropped video to the left, or you can type values into the X and Y fields. Leave "Y" set to 0.00, and for "X" enter half of your cropped window width. For Std Def (NTSC or PAL) enter X = -180 (half of 360) to move the video to the left half of the screen, or X = 180 to move it to the right half of the screen. (For Full HD use -960 and 960, and for HDV use -720 and 720.)

This is easiest if you don't have anything else on the two tracks with the cropped video. If you DO have other video on those tracks, the Track Motion will affect all of the videos. To remedy this situation you will need to create Track Motion keyframes just before and after your videos to set the Track Motion settings back to normal as needed.

Tim L

Have you tried untoggling the Lock Aspect Ratio button along the left side of the Pan/Crop panel?

Thanks for the detailed reply. I didn't know about that aspect ratio box so I appreciate you and Steve pointing that out and those sizes for the various video types help as well. I'm new to this program and there's much to learn. It a real help to be able to ask specific questions on tricky parts of actual projects.

I thought I had this but now can't do another task which follows the same path. I have a video showing the whole room. I want to crop the figure standing in the middle of the room. I've said "no" to maintain aspect ratio and yes to stretch to fill frame. When I try to reduce the width the height gets smaller too? I want the figure in the middle of the room to appear as if the camera was focused on him from head to toe but no wider than him. I'd like it to take up as much of the video screen as possible. Thanks for further info.
In short I don't understand why, after disabling aspect ratio I can't drag the boundaries of height and width separately when cropping? Even after saying no to maintain aspect ration, when I enter height as twice the width, it automatically changes it back to the original aspect ratio. Now I can't seem to turn it off. Is there another setting I'm missing?