Free video cropper

How do I crop a video?

Add the video above and drag the crop frame over the part you want to keep, with the mouse, by touch or with the arrow keys. Lock it to 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 4:3 if the video is for a specific platform, or crop freely to cut a single window out of a screen recording. Then crop and download the new file as MP4 or WebM, with the sound kept. Everything runs in your browser.

Cropping vs resizing

These two get confused, and they solve different problems:

To fit a platform exactly, crop to the right shape here, then scale it with the video resizer if the pixel size matters too.

Common aspect ratios

• 16:9 (landscape). YouTube, presentations, help-center embeds and most screens.
• 9:16 (vertical). YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok and stories.
• 1:1 (square). Social feeds where a square takes more space than landscape.
• 4:5 (portrait). Instagram and LinkedIn feeds; taller than square without going full vertical.
• 4:3. Older slides and screens, and a calmer frame for a single app window.

Cropping screen recordings

Screen recordings are often captured full screen at a high resolution, while the thing you want to show fills a corner. Cropping is the fix:

• Focus on one window or panel. Crop to the settings dialog or the form you’re explaining, so viewers don’t search the screen.
• Remove private edges. Crop away the browser’s tabs and bookmarks, the menu bar, desktop icons or a chat sidebar. For details in the middle of the picture, blur screenshots with the screenshot redactor instead, or re-record.
• Make text bigger. A cropped area shown at the same size on the page makes small interface text easier to read.

Keep in mind that cropping keeps the pixels you had. Cropping a 400-pixel-wide area out of a 1080p recording and showing it at 1080p will look soft, because the detail was never recorded. For crisp close-ups, record at a high resolution, or record just the window.

Turning a landscape video vertical

To make a 16:9 video into a 9:16 Short or Reel, lock the crop to 9:16 and place the frame over the most important part. A vertical slice of a landscape video is narrow, roughly a third of the width, so it works best when the action stays in one area: a person talking, a phone screen, a single panel. For screen recordings that move around a lot, a vertical crop will cut things off; a dedicated vertical edit usually works better.

Crop or add bars?

Cropping always removes something. When every part of the picture matters, such as a full-screen walkthrough where menus appear in all corners, the alternative is to keep the whole frame and place it on a background in the new shape, with bars above and below or at the sides. The video resizer does that, on a colour or a blurred copy of the video. As a rule of thumb: crop when one area tells the story, add bars when the whole screen does.

Does cropping lose quality?

Cropping itself removes pixels at the edges and leaves the rest. The video does have to be re-encoded, as any change to the picture requires, which loses a little detail; at the default quality it’s hard to see. Crop from the original recording, not a compressed copy.

Tips

Leave a margin

Platforms overlay buttons and captions near the edges of vertical videos. Keep text and faces away from the very top and bottom.

Check the first and last seconds

The crop is fixed for the whole video. Scrub through to make sure nothing important moves out of the frame.