Crop Video

Drag it on your own footage

A frame of your video is drawn on screen and you draw the crop on top of it. The readout shows the actual pixel dimensions you are selecting, not preview coordinates, so you know exactly what you are producing.

That matters because cropping is entirely a judgement about your specific footage — where the subject sits, what is intruding at the edge, how much headroom there is. Aspect presets and numeric fields, which is what most free croppers offer, mean guessing and then checking.

Cropping for vertical, which is why most people are here

Taking a normal 16:9 video to the 9:16 shape that Reels, TikTok and Shorts want means discarding roughly 70% of the width. That is not a tweak; it is a re-composition, and it is where the result is won or lost.

Three things follow from it. Put the crop where the subject is, which is very often not the centre — an interview framed with the speaker to one side needs the crop over the speaker, and a centred crop will cut them in half. Check the whole clip, not one frame: if the subject moves, a crop that works at the start may lose them halfway, and a single fixed crop simply cannot follow movement. Leave headroom, because vertical platforms lay their own interface over the top and bottom of the frame — captions, buttons, usernames — and anything important too close to an edge ends up behind it.

If the subject does move across the frame, the honest answer is that cropping is the wrong tool and you need to cut between two differently cropped versions, or re-shoot vertically.

Cropping is not resizing

Worth being clear, because it catches people out. Cropping gives you a smaller frame — fewer pixels, same detail. It does not scale anything up to fill a target resolution.

So a 1080p clip cropped to a narrow vertical strip comes out perhaps 600 pixels wide, and if a platform wants 1080×1920 you will need to resize afterwards — which enlarges those pixels and costs sharpness. That is the real cost of aggressive cropping: you are spending resolution. Cropping a 4K source to vertical still leaves plenty; cropping a 720p source hard leaves very little.

Two small technical notes

The crop is rounded down to an even number of pixels in each direction, because the H.264 video codec requires even dimensions. So the output may be a pixel narrower or shorter than the rectangle you drew. Nothing is wrong; it just cannot be odd.

And cropping re-encodes the video, because the frame itself changes — unlike adding an audio track, where the picture can be copied through untouched. One pass looks fine; what costs quality is putting the same clip through several tools in a row. The audio is stream-copied, so the sound is bit-for-bit identical to your original.

Related tools

Rotate Video fixes orientation, which is worth doing before cropping rather than after. Trim Video cuts the clip to length — and trimming first means you only have to get the crop right for the part you are keeping. Video Compressor reduces the finished file.