Crop a video
Cut the edges off, or pull a square or vertical frame out of a wide one.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
How the numbers work
Crop width and height are the size of the piece you keep. The offsets say where that piece starts, measured in pixels from the top left corner of the original. Leave "center the crop" ticked and the offsets are worked out for you, which is what you want most of the time.
Some useful crops from a 1920 × 1080 source:
- Square: 1080 × 1080, centerd.
- Vertical 9:16: 608 × 1080, centerd.
- Remove a letterbox bar: keep the width at 1920, set the height to the real picture height, and set the top offset to the bar thickness.
Run the media info tool first if you are not sure of the source resolution.
Cropping throws pixels away
This is worth being deliberate about, because it is the one thing crop cannot give back. Taking a 9:16 vertical slice out of a 1920 by 1080 landscape frame keeps 608 pixels of width and discards the other 1312. The result is genuinely 608 pixels wide, so if the destination expects 1080 it will be scaled up, and scaling up does not restore detail. Vertical video cut from landscape footage is always softer than vertical video that was shot vertical, and no setting changes that.
When the target is a vertical platform, make a short handles the reframing differently: it fills the background with a blurred copy of the picture and places the sharp frame over it, which keeps the full width of the shot and loses nothing. Whether that looks better than a hard crop depends on the footage, and it is worth trying both.
Even numbers only
h.264 stores colour at half resolution horizontally and vertically, so it needs both dimensions to be even. An odd width or height will fail the encode outright. If a crop is refused, that is nearly always why: round the number down by one and it will run.
Working out the offsets
Leave centring on unless you have a reason not to, since most crops are about shape rather than position. When you do need a specific area, the offsets are measured in pixels from the top left corner of the original, x across and y down. The practical way to find them is to grab a still with grab a frame, open it in anything that shows pixel coordinates, and read the corner of the region you want.
For removing letterbox bars from an old film transfer, keep the full width, set the height to the real picture height, and set the vertical offset to the thickness of the top bar. Media info gives you the source resolution to subtract from, and the bars are usually equal top and bottom, so measuring one is enough.
Common questions
Can I drag a box over the video instead of typing numbers?
Not yet. Grab a frame with the frame tool, open it in any image viewer to read off the pixel coordinates, then type them here.
Does cropping re-encode the video?
Yes. Cropping changes every frame, so it cannot be done by copying the stream.