Resize Video

About changing a video's resolution

A phone records in 4K whether you wanted it to or not. That is a beautiful file and a useless one: too big to email, too big for the upload box, far more detail than anything it will be watched on.

Dropping the resolution is the blunt fix and usually the right one. A 4K clip at 1080p is a quarter of the pixels and a fraction of the size, and on a phone screen or in a video call almost nobody can tell.

Drop the video in, pick the size you want, and download it. Nothing is uploaded — the whole conversion runs in this page.

How to use it

• Click Click to upload or drop your video on the page
• Choose the new resolution — 1080p, 720p, 480p and so on
• Leave Quality on *Balanced* unless you have a reason not to
• Press Resize video and wait. You can switch tabs; just keep this one open
• Preview the result, then Download MP4

The first run downloads the video engine, about 30 MB, once. After that it is instant to start.

Which resolution to pick

• 1080p — the safe default. Still sharp on any laptop or TV, and about a quarter the size of 4K
• 720p — right for video calls, messaging apps, and anything watched on a phone
• 480p — when the file has to be small and the picture matters less, like a screen recording of text
• Keep original — leave the size alone and just re-encode at a different quality

The aspect ratio is kept, so nothing is stretched or cropped. A vertical phone video stays vertical.

Resolution or quality — they do different things

Both make the file smaller, and they fail differently, which is why both are here.

• Lower resolution throws away pixels. The picture stays clean, it is simply smaller. Shrinking a 4K clip to 1080p costs almost nothing you can see
• Lower quality keeps every pixel but describes each one with less data. Push it too far and you get blocks and smearing, especially where things move

For most files, dropping the resolution one step and leaving quality on *Balanced* gives a much better result than keeping 4K at low quality.

What people use it for

• Getting a clip under an upload limit on a form, portal or messaging app
• Making a 4K phone video small enough to email or send
• Preparing a screen recording for sharing, where 4K is pure waste
• Shrinking footage before uploading over a slow connection
• Making a video small enough to fit alongside other files on a USB stick
• Cutting the size of a long lecture or meeting recording for archiving

Good to know

• Nothing is uploaded. The video never leaves your device, whatever its size
• The original file on your disk is untouched — you download a new one
• The output is MP4 (H.264), which plays everywhere
• The aspect ratio is always kept; resizing never crops the picture
• The engine downloads once, then it is cached
• Very long or very large videos take a while — the work is happening on your own machine, not on a server
• On a phone this works but is slow; a computer is much better for long clips

Related tools

• Compress Video — the same engine, when file size rather than resolution is the goal
• Compress Video to a Size — hit an exact megabyte target
• Crop Video — change the shape of the frame, not the number of pixels
• Trim Video — make it shorter instead of smaller
• Video to GIF — turn a short clip into an animated GIF