How to crop a video
- Drop an MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV into the box above.
- Pick a shape: Square 1:1, Vertical 9:16, Portrait 4:5, Wide 16:9, or Free for any size.
- Drag the white box over the part of the picture you want to keep, and pull its corner to make it bigger or smaller. Use the slider under the video to check a later moment, so a person who moves does not walk out of the frame. You can also type exact pixel values.
- Press Crop video, check the result in the player and download it.
Which shape for which app
| Where it is going | Shape | From a 1920×1080 video you get |
|---|---|---|
| Reels, Shorts, TikTok, Stories | 9:16 | 608×1080 |
| Instagram feed, tallest it shows | 4:5 | 864×1080 |
| Profile videos, square posts | 1:1 | 1080×1080 |
| YouTube, a vertical phone video turned wide | 16:9 | the widest 16:9 band that fits |
Cropping keeps the pixels you choose at their own size; it does not stretch them. A 9:16 crop of a landscape 1080p video is 608 pixels wide, which apps accept and enlarge on the phone screen. If you have a choice, record vertical videos vertically: you keep all 1080 pixels of width.
What happens to the quality
A video file has no dependable way to say “only show this part of the picture”, so cropping has to decode the frames, cut them and encode them again as H.264. Two things decide how much that costs:
- The bitrate. This page sets it in proportion to the area you keep, with 20% extra, and shows the figure before you start. Keeping a third of the picture gets about a third of the original bitrate plus the margin, never less than 1 Mbps.
- No scaling. The kept pixels are not resized, so there is no softening from enlarging or shrinking.
We measured it on a 12-second phone video (1920×1080, 8 Mbps, 12.16 MB) cropped to 9:16. The result was 608×1080 at about 3 Mbps and 4.71 MB, all 360 frames were there, and compared with the same area of the original the picture scored an average of 40.5 dB PSNR, a level where differences are very hard to see. It took about two seconds in Chrome on a laptop. The sound is copied across unchanged.
Why the numbers move in steps of two
H.264 stores colour at half resolution, so it needs an even width and height. Some tools accept an odd size and quietly stretch the picture by one pixel, or drop the video track; this page rounds the box to even numbers as you drag, so what the box shows is what you get.
Vertical phone videos
Phones store a vertical video on its side with a note that says how to turn it. The crop is applied to the picture as you see it, after that turn: the 1080×1920 test video cropped to a square came out 1080×1080, from the part the box covered. The result has no rotation note left, so it shows the same way in every app.
Related tools
- Rotate video — turn a sideways clip upright without re-encoding.
- Trim video — cut the start or end off.
- Compress video — get under an upload or email limit.
- Crop image — the same for photos.