Video Cropper

Cropping changes the shape of the frame, which matters because each place you post to expects a particular shape. A recording filmed sideways on a phone is wide, so it sits in a small strip when posted somewhere that expects a tall picture. It is also the simplest way to remove a distracting edge, a bystander or a black bar.

• 9:16, tall — stories and vertical posts on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat
• 1:1, square — ordinary Instagram and Facebook feed posts
• 16:9, wide — YouTube and other landscape players

No, the two are unrelated. Cropping works on the picture: you keep a rectangle of the frame and discard the edges around it, while the clip still runs from beginning to end and keeps its sound. Shortening a recording is a separate job, done by choosing a start and an end time. The rectangle is free to drag by default, or you can lock it to a preset such as 1080x1920 for a story post.

Pick your video before looking for this control: the crop settings open in the editor once a file is loaded.

Choose the shape that matches the content rather than habit. Tall content - letters, reports, most reading material - belongs in portrait, while wide content is far easier to follow in landscape.

• Portrait - letters, reports, invoices, books and anything mostly text
• Landscape - wide spreadsheets, charts, photographs taken horizontally and slide handouts

Choose a shape from the Aspect Ratio list and the crop box locks to it, so your finished video has exactly that shape. Use 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Stories, 1:1 or 4:5 for Instagram and Facebook feeds, and 16:9 for YouTube; there are also exact sizes such as 1080x1920 for an Instagram Story. Freeform lets you draw any rectangle, Same as original keeps your current shape, and Custom lets you type your own ratio. Once your file is open in the editor, the crop frame reshapes as you pick, so you can see exactly what will be kept.

• 9:16 – vertical phone video
• 1:1 / 4:5 – social media feeds
• 16:9 – YouTube and TV
• 21:9 -- Cinemascope – a wide cinematic look

These two boxes live in the editor rather than on this page; upload a video and they sit beside the crop frame.

Enter the two numbers that describe the shape you want, not a size. For a square, put the same number in both boxes; for a wide landscape shape, use a larger horizontal figure than vertical; for the tall shape used by phone-screen video, reverse that.

• 1 and 1 - a square, for feed posts on Instagram or Facebook
• 16 and 9 - standard widescreen, for YouTube and TV
• 9 and 16 - the upright shape used by stories, reels and short-video feeds
• 4 and 5 - the taller feed post that fills more of a phone screen

They are left outside the frame, so anything beyond the edges is trimmed away for good in the new file. That is exactly what you want when reshaping a wide clip for a phone-shaped feed, but it does mean subtitles, logos or faces near an edge can disappear. Choose Freeform if you would rather move the frame around by hand and check what stays in, and always look at the result before sharing it.

The editor shades the discarded area around the crop frame, so you can see what a locked ratio would remove before committing.

Add your video first - these fields appear in the editor, and they update as you resize the crop box by hand.

Enter the size, in pixels, of the piece you want to keep - not the size of the original. Work out roughly how much of the frame you actually need, and remember the measurement starts from the corner position you have set rather than from the middle. If you want a specific shape for a platform, calculate the pair to match: a square post needs equal numbers, and an upright phone-screen shape needs the height to be noticeably larger than the width.

A rectangle bigger than the source cannot conjure up extra picture, so the request is limited to what actually exists - you may get the whole frame instead of the crop you expected. Odd numbers are rounded down to the nearest even number, which is a technical requirement of video and shifts your result by a single pixel at most. And since cropping discards everything outside the box permanently, it is worth checking that captions, logos and faces near the edges are inside it.

Any figure you type is checked against your actual video, which the editor only knows about once a file has been added.

You reach these boxes by choosing a video; they appear in the editor next to the frame you can drag into place.

These two boxes set where the top left corner of your crop starts, measured in pixels from the top left of the original. Enter 0 in both to start right at the corner, and increase them to move the crop box across and down. To centre the crop, subtract the crop size from the original size and use half the difference in each box.

• 0 and 0 - keep the top left area, useful for cropping off a lower banner
• Larger horizontal value - moves the box to the right
• Larger vertical value - moves the box down, handy for trimming a title bar from the top

These boxes only appear once you've chosen a video and the editor opens, alongside the crop frame you can drag — you won't find them on this page.

In the editor, the crop box always stays fully inside the video frame, so the number you type gets pulled back to the largest value that still fits. The limit is the original width minus your crop width for Position-X, and the original height minus your crop height for Position-Y. On a 1920x1080 video with a 1280x720 crop, that caps the x, y positions at 640 and 360.