How to crop a video (change the frame, not the length)
Cut away the edges of a video frame, switch it to 9:16 for Reels or 1:1 for feeds, and remove black bars — free and without uploading.
Cropping changes the shape of the picture — you keep the middle and throw away the edges. It's what you want when footage was shot in the wrong orientation for where it's going, when there's something distracting at the edge of frame, or when black bars have been baked into the file.
Cropping vs trimming vs resizing
- Crop changes the frame — what's visible in the picture.
- Trim changes the duration — where the clip starts and ends. That's Trim Video.
- Resize changes the pixel dimensions without cutting anything away. That's Resize Video.
Crop a video in your browser
Drop in your clip
Open the Crop Video tool and add your file. It's processed on your device, not uploaded.
Drag the crop box
Pull the handles to frame the part you want to keep. The preview updates live.
Lock an aspect ratio if you need one
Pick 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 16:9 to hit a platform's shape exactly rather than eyeballing it.
Export
Render and download the cropped video.
Which aspect ratio for which platform
- TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts: 9:16 vertical.
- Instagram feed video: 4:5 portrait takes up the most screen, 1:1 square is the safe default.
- YouTube, and video embedded on a website: 16:9 landscape.
Turning landscape footage vertical
Cropping a 16:9 clip to 9:16 throws away most of the width, so whatever matters has to be near the centre of frame — a wide shot of a group will lose the people at either end. Check the preview before exporting. If the subject moves around the frame, cropping tightly will lose them, and reframing shot by shot in the Video Editor is the better route.
Removing black bars
Black bars that are part of the video itself — letterboxing baked in by whatever exported it — are just pixels, and cropping them off is the fix. Set the crop box to the edge of the actual picture on all four sides. Bars that appear only in a particular player aren't in the file at all; they're the player padding a mismatched shape, and cropping won't touch them.
Does cropping reduce quality?
The video is re-encoded when it's cropped, so there's one generation of compression loss — usually invisible at sensible settings. The bigger consideration is resolution: crop a 1080p clip down to a small region and you're left with fewer pixels, which will look soft if it's then displayed full-screen. Crop from the highest-resolution source you have.
Want a circle rather than a rectangle, on a still image? Circle Crop does that for photos and avatars.