How to crop a video
Cropping cuts away the edges of the frame and keeps the middle. Use it to straighten up a badly framed shot, remove something at the edge, or turn a wide clip into a vertical one.
Crop in your browser
Our cropper runs locally. The file is not uploaded and there is no account to make.
- Drop the video in.
- Press C or tap Crop. A box appears over the picture.
- Under Output, set Format to the shape you want, such as 9:16 for Reels. The box takes that shape and keeps it while you drag, so a wide clip becomes a true vertical one with no bars.
- Drag the corners to set how much you keep. Drag from the middle to slide the box over the subject. Double click the box to make it as large as the shape allows.
- Zoom in first, with pinch or the zoom buttons, if you need the edges placed precisely.
- Press Export.
Leave Format on Original for a free crop of any shape.
Landscape to portrait
For just this job, without the rest of the editor, there are two small pages that work on a phone: landscape to portrait and portrait to landscape. Drag the picture to choose what stays in the frame, or keep the whole picture with blurred bars.
A 16:9 clip cut to 9:16 keeps a strip about a third as wide as the original. Set Format to 9:16, press C, and slide the box left or right until the subject sits inside it. The export is the full height of the source, so a 1080p landscape clip gives a 608 by 1080 portrait file. If the subject does not fit in the strip, keep the whole frame instead with the blurred fill, described below.
Crop, or resize, or both
These get confused, and they do different things.
- Crop throws away part of the frame. The subject gets bigger, the resolution drops.
- Resize keeps the whole frame and changes the output shape, adding bars where the picture does not reach.
- Blur fill fills those bars with a blurred copy of the video instead of black.
If the subject already fits a vertical frame, crop. If it does not, resize with a blurred fill. Cropping a wide shot hard enough to make it vertical usually cuts the subject in half.
Keeping the quality
- Start from the original file, not a copy that has been through WhatsApp or Instagram.
- Do not crop further than you need. Cropping a 1920 wide clip to 640 wide gives you a 640 wide video, and no amount of exporting at 1080p puts the detail back.
- Crop once. Every export re-encodes. Do all your edits in one pass rather than cropping, saving, and cropping again.
Questions
Does cropping reduce resolution?
Yes. You keep only the pixels inside the box. That is unavoidable, so crop from the highest resolution source you have.
Can I crop different parts of a long video?
Not in one pass. The crop applies to the whole clip. Trim it into sections and crop each one separately.
Can I apply the same crop to several clips?
Yes. Set it up on one clip and press A for Apply to all.