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.
- Drag the corners to set the area you keep. Drag from the middle to move the whole box.
- Zoom in first, with pinch or the zoom buttons, if you need the edges placed precisely.
- Under Output, set Format if you want a fixed shape, such as 9:16 for Reels.
- Press Export.
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.