I am trying to prepare a collection of ~120 video clips to be played in VLC Player and projected on a low-res (1024x768) projector during a DIY electronic music event. The source clips are all super hi-res abstract visuals in .mov format, about 4GB each. They are of various aspect ratios. Some are 4:3, others are 16:9, others are 1:1 (square) etc.
I would like to crop / scale all of the clips to 1024x768 while maintaining their respective original aspect ratios. And, I would like to do so without letterboxing them and leaving black bars either at the top/bottom or left/right. Basically what I would like to do is to reduce them to the point where they entirely fill the 1024x768 screen, and no smaller. I believe that is essentially a "pan and scan" technique?
(It doesn't matter if part of the image is removed in the process - they're just spinning geometric shapes and such.)
Is there some way I can resize all ~120 videos in batch using a single FFMPEG command? Or, is there another tool for Windows or Linux that would work? I don't really care what output format - just something that VLC can play without getting choppy.