About the Video Cropper
This free video cropper cuts the edges off a video. Drag a box over the part you want to keep, press the button, and download the result. The whole job runs in your browser — the file is never uploaded, there is no account, and there is no watermark.
The most common reason people need it: a clip was filmed landscape and it has to go somewhere vertical. Pick 9:16 and the box snaps to the right shape — slide it left or right until your subject is inside it, and you have a Reel, a TikTok or a Short.
Cropping is not resizing
These two words get mixed up constantly, and they do very different things.
Resizing keeps the whole picture and changes how many pixels it is made of. Nothing is lost, but if you change the shape at the same time, everything gets stretched — that is where thin faces and squashed logos come from.
Cropping keeps the shape of what is inside the box and throws away everything outside it. Nothing is stretched. Nothing is distorted. You simply keep less of the frame.
So when a landscape 1920 × 1080 video is cropped to 9:16, you end up with a strip about 608 × 1080 — the full height, and about a third of the width. That is why *where* you put the box matters so much: everything to the left and right of it is gone.
If losing that much is too costly, do not crop — use the second mode, where you choose exactly how much to give up.
Two ways to change the shape
At the top you choose what should happen to the edges. This is the most important setting on the page.
Cut them off. The classic crop. You drag a box, and only what is inside it survives. Best when you want an exact rectangle — trimming black bars off, or grabbing one corner of a screen recording.
Fit to the shape. Instead of an all-or-nothing choice, you get a slider. Drag it from Show everything to Fill the frame, and stop anywhere you like:
- At 0% the whole picture is kept and the gaps around it are filled. Nothing is lost.
- At 100% the picture is enlarged until it covers the shape completely. No gaps, but the edges are cut.
- Anywhere between you lose a little and pad a little — which is usually the best-looking answer.
Then drag the picture itself to choose which part survives. The slider decides how much you keep; the drag decides which part.
Take a landscape 1920 × 1080 clip going to 9:16:
- 0% gives 1920 × 3413 — the whole frame in the middle, wide bands above and below.
- 100% gives 608 × 1080 — the full height and about a third of the width, the rest gone.
- 50% gives roughly 1264 × 2247 — you lose some of the sides, and the bands are much thinner.
Most clips look best somewhere around 40–70%: the bars stop dominating, and you have not thrown away the whole shot.
What to fill the gaps with
Whenever the slider is below 100% there is space to fill:
- A blurred copy of the video *(the default)* — the same frame, enlarged to cover the whole shape and blurred out. This is what almost every reposted vertical video uses, because the gaps stop looking like a mistake and the colours always match the shot.
- Black — the plain letterbox. Honest, and it disappears on a dark background.
- White — better on a light feed or a website.
- A colour — pick anything, for example your brand colour.
The blurred fill costs a little more time, because the video is drawn twice: once blurred behind, once sharp in front.
Nothing is ever enlarged or softened
This is the part that keeps quality, and it is worth understanding.
Your picture is always drawn at its own pixel size. The slider does not zoom the video — it changes the size of the *frame around it*. At 0% the frame is big enough to hold the whole picture; at 100% it is small enough to be covered by it.
So no matter where you stop, every pixel in the result came straight from your file. Nothing is stretched, nothing is blown up, nothing goes soft. The output size shown under the video changes as you slide, because it is the honest size of what you are making.
A 640 × 360 clip at 9:16 gives 640 × 1138 at 0% and 202 × 360 at 100% — both at native quality. A tool that always produced 1080 × 1920 would have to enlarge that 640-wide picture by 70%, which looks worse and makes a bigger file for nothing.
The shapes, and where each one goes
- 9:16 — Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, Snapchat. The full-screen phone shape.
- 1:1 — a square. Safe for an Instagram or Facebook feed post, and it never gets cut awkwardly in a timeline.
- 4:5 — Instagram's tall feed post. It takes up more screen than a square without going full-height, which is why it usually gets more attention in the feed.
- 16:9 — normal widescreen. Use it to tidy the edges of a clip that is already landscape, or to cut black bars off.
- 4:3 — the older TV shape, still used for some presentations and older cameras.
- Free — no locking at all. Drag any rectangle you like.
Pick a shape and the box locks to it: drag a corner and it keeps the ratio, so you cannot end up slightly off by accident.
Getting a good vertical crop from a landscape clip
Vertical crops fail for one reason — the subject drifts out of the strip.
- Play the video first, all the way through, before you set the box. A person who starts centre-frame often walks left.
- Put the box where the subject spends most of its time, not where it starts.
- Leave room above the head. Phone apps put buttons, captions and usernames along the bottom and right of the screen, so keep the important part in the middle.
- If the subject moves too far, a single crop cannot follow it. Cut the clip into two pieces with Trim Video and crop each piece separately.
- Check the numbers under the box. They are the real output size in pixels — if that reads much smaller than you expected, you are cropping into a small part of the frame and it will look soft.
Black bars: crop them, don't live with them
A video that has been through the wrong export often has black bars baked into the picture — top and bottom, or left and right. Once they are part of the frame, no player can remove them.
Cropping is how you get rid of them. Choose Free, drag the box to the inside edge of the bars, and the exported video contains only the real picture.
Good to know
- Cropping always re-encodes the video — there is no way to change the picture without redrawing it, so this is slower than a trim or a repack. Short clips are quick; long ones take a while.
- The output is MP4 (H.264 + AAC), which plays anywhere.
- Sizes are rounded to even numbers. H.264 needs that, and it can shift the box by a single pixel — invisible in the result.
- The first run downloads a one-time ~30 MB engine, then it is cached. The work runs in a background worker, so you can switch tabs — just keep this tab open.
- Audio is kept exactly as it was.
- Nothing is uploaded. Your video never leaves your device.
Related tools
- Trim Video — cut the clip shorter in time, rather than smaller in frame
- Video Editor — rotate, flip, change the speed and add music on a timeline
- Compress Video — shrink the file once you have cropped it
- MOV to MP4 — convert an iPhone clip before cropping it
- Video to GIF — turn the cropped clip into a GIF
- Crop Image — the same job for a photo
How to use it
- Upload a video — click the box or drag a file onto it
- Play it through once so you know where your subject moves
- Choose what happens to the edges — *Cut them off* for an exact box, or *Fit to the shape* to slide between keeping everything and filling the frame
- Pick a shape — 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts; 1:1 for a square; or *Free* for anything
- If you are cutting, drag the box to frame what you want to keep, and drag the white squares to resize it
- If you are fitting, move the slider until the bars look right, drag the picture to pick what stays, and choose what fills the gaps — the blurred copy usually looks best
- Check the output size shown under the video
- Press Crop video (or Export video in fit mode) and wait — you can switch tabs while it runs
- Press Download the video
