Crop Video

From a 1920×1080 clip, a 9:16 crop at full height is 606×1080 pixels. Choose 1080p as the output size to get 1080×1920 for an app that asks for it.

The box always starts as the largest area of the chosen shape, centred. Drag inside it to move it; it stops at the frame's edges. Drag a corner to resize it; with a shape preset the corners keep the shape, with Free they move each side independently. The bright part is what you keep, the dimmed part is cut.

A subject that moves around is the usual problem with cropping. Use the Preview frame slider to look at the start, middle and end before you crop, and leave a little room on the side the person walks toward. The line under the preview gives the exact crop in pixels and its position from the top left corner.

As cropped keeps every pixel inside the box at its original resolution. That is the sharpest result and the smallest file. 720p and 1080p scale the cropped area so its short side is 720 or 1,080 pixels. Scaling up meets an app's size requirement but can't add detail, and the page warns you when that happens.

Cropping always re-encodes the picture to H.264, since pixels are being removed from every frame. The bitrate is set from the output size at about 0.07 bits per pixel per frame and never higher than the original clip spent on the same area, so a crop doesn't come out bigger than it needs to be. The sound is copied when it is already AAC and converted to AAC otherwise.

Speed, measured on our test server without a graphics card: a 60 second 1920×1080 clip cropped to a square in 19.5 seconds with the browser's built-in encoder. A 4 second 720p clip took 2.2 seconds that way and 5.9 seconds when the FFmpeg fallback was used.

Removing black bars. Some videos have bars baked into the picture, for example a 4:3 clip exported inside a 16:9 frame. Choose Free and drag the corners in until the box touches the picture on all sides. The bars are gone and the file gets smaller, since black still costs bits to encode.

Hiding a taskbar or a webcam corner in a screen recording. Choose Free and pull the bottom edge up past the taskbar. Keep As cropped, so the text in the recording stays at its original sharpness.

Turning a landscape talk into a vertical clip. Choose 9:16, move the box over the speaker and check the Preview frame slider at several points. If the speaker walks across the stage, trim the video into shorter parts first and crop each one separately.

• The preview area is empty. Your browser can't play that video (common with HEVC from iPhones in some browsers). The crop still works from the numbers shown under the box, and the result is a normal H.264 MP4.
• The size is one pixel off. H.264 needs even widths and heights, so an odd crop like 607 pixels is rounded to 606.
• A phone video comes out sideways. Phones often store video lying down with a rotation flag. The crop box works on the video as it is shown, and the result is saved upright without a flag, so it should look like the preview. If it doesn't, try the same file in Chrome or Edge.

• Crop removes parts of the picture and changes its shape.
• Resize Video keeps the whole picture and changes its resolution, for example 1080p to 720p.
• Trim Video removes time from the start or end.
• Compress Video makes the file smaller to meet a size limit.

For a vertical Short from a long landscape recording, trim first, then crop: you re-encode only the part you keep, which is faster.