Crop Video

Drop a video above and a crop box appears over the preview. Drag inside the box to move it, or drag one of its corners to resize it. The area outside the box is darkened so you can see exactly what will be removed. For a precise result, type the left and top offset and the width and height in pixels — the box follows.

To crop to a standard shape, choose it under Shape. The box snaps to the largest centred area of that shape and keeps its proportions while you resize it, so you only have to move it into place.

Which shape for which platform

Removing black bars

Black bars are often part of the picture itself: a 4:3 clip placed in a 16:9 frame, a phone screen recording with a border, or a film letterboxed for widescreen and then re-uploaded. Players cannot hide those because they are pixels like any other. Drag the crop box until its edges sit just inside the real image and the bars fall outside it; with Free shape selected each edge can move independently.

Cropping versus reframing

Cropping always throws part of the picture away. That is right when the edges hold nothing you need — a cluttered background, a watermark in a corner, a stranger at the side of the shot. When you want a different shape but need to keep the whole frame, Change Aspect Ratio can fit the original into the new shape over a blurred copy of itself, the way short-form platforms present landscape video. And if you need the same picture at a different size,resize it instead.

Quality

The pixels inside the box are kept at their original resolution — nothing is scaled up or down — so a 1080 × 1080 square cut from a 1920 × 1080 video is as sharp as the original. The video is re-encoded, because its frame has a new shape, using your device's hardware encoder at a high quality setting. Width and height are kept to even numbers, which every video codec requires. If the cropped file is larger than you need, run it through theVideo Compressor afterwards.