Crop Video
Crop your videos to remove unwanted edges or focus on specific areas. Perfect for removing black bars, adjusting aspect ratio, or zooming in on details.
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Cropping and aspect ratio in video
Cropping a video removes pixels from the edges of every frame, changing both the dimensions and the aspect ratio. Unlike cropping a photograph, it always requires a full re-encode, because every frame in the sequence must be redrawn at the new size — which is why it takes real processing time on anything longer than a short clip.
Aspect ratio is usually the whole reason. Landscape 16:9 footage placed in a vertical 9:16 feed is displayed with heavy black bars unless it is cropped, and cropping to vertical throws away two thirds of the width, so what remains must be chosen deliberately. Square 1:1 sits between the two. The other consideration is resolution: crop a 1080p video to a narrow strip and you may be left with too few pixels for the platform's minimum.
Why we built this tool
The common cases are reformatting landscape footage for vertical platforms, removing black bars baked into a file, cutting an unwanted element out of the frame, and tightening a screen recording onto the part that matters.
That footage is often personal or internal, and video files are big enough that uploading them to an editing service is genuinely slow. Ours re-encodes with WebAssembly FFmpeg inside your browser, so the video stays on your device, there is no file-size limit, no account, and no watermark on the export — which is how most free online video editors monetise the same operation.
Tips and common mistakes
- Cropping always re-encodes, so allow real processing time on long clips.
- Check the framing at several points in the timeline, since the subject moves.
- Confirm the output resolution still meets the platform's minimum after a tight crop.
- Vertical crops of landscape footage discard two thirds of the width — shoot vertical if you know the destination.
Quick start: using Crop Video
- Load the video you want to reframe.
- Choose a target aspect ratio or drag a custom crop region.
- Position the region over the part of the frame that matters, checking a few points in the timeline.
- Confirm the output resolution is still adequate for its destination.
- Export and review the result before publishing.
Trim the length first with Trim Video, then compress the output using Compress Video.