Crop video

The two are easy to mix up. Resizing keeps the whole picture and just makes it smaller or larger; with a different aspect ratio you get black bars, or the app trims the edges automatically. Cropping lets you decide which part of the picture stays: from a landscape video you can cut the upright 9:16 slice exactly where the speaker stands, not just the middle.

If you want the full picture at a new size, resize video is the better fit. If you want to focus on a detail, get rid of a distracting object, a watermark or black bars, or tailor the frame for social media, cropping is what you need.

The output size is the pixel size of the area you crop – we don't artificially upscale. Cropping a 9:16 slice from a 1920×1080 landscape video gives you about 606×1080 pixels. Social platforms accept that and scale it up; if a platform insists on exactly 1080×1920, upscale the cropped clip with resize video.

• Move: grab the inside of the frame and drag it where you want it. With the keyboard, the arrow keys move it 2 pixels, or 20 with Shift.
• Resize: drag the corners. With a preset selected the frame keeps its ratio; in Free mode it can be any rectangle.
• Exact pixels: type values straight into Left, Top, Width and Height. The tool switches to Free mode so the number you typed stays put.
• Even sizes: the H.264 encoder needs an even width and height, so the final size rounds to the nearest even number – at most a pixel or two off.

Behind the frame you see a frame of the video, and the grid lines help with the rule of thirds: put the important part on one of the intersections.

To crop, every frame of the video has to be decoded, cut and encoded again – compressed video has no “empty” area that can simply be dropped. Your browser's built-in video encoder (WebCodecs) does this through Mediabunny, an open-source media library. The output is H.264 MP4, which every phone, computer and social network plays.

The audio is copied unchanged if it fits in an MP4 (AAC, MP3, Opus); if it doesn't, uncompressed PCM audio for example, it's encoded to AAC. We use a high quality setting so the cropped picture doesn't turn blocky. Speed depends on your device: a one-minute 1080p clip usually finishes well under a minute on a modern laptop.

• Don't cut landscape out of portrait: a 16:9 slice of an upright phone video can only be a small strip. Black-bar resizing or a blurred background usually works better.
• Moving subjects: if the person moves around a lot, choose a wider frame, because the crop position stays the same for the whole video.
• Removing black bars: for old 4:3 or letterboxed footage, set the frame exactly to the picture's edge and the bars disappear.
• Watermarks and date stamps: if one sits in a corner, a slightly tighter frame removes it – a quick fix for your own footage.
• Rotated video? Fix it first with rotate video, then crop.

Cropping works in Chrome, Edge and recent Safari and Firefox, on computers and phones. If your browser doesn't support built-in video encoding, the tool tells you up front. Not a single byte of your video is uploaded: your browser reads and processes the file, and the finished MP4 is assembled in memory until you download it.