Cropping isn't resizing
Cropping removes part of the picture. What's left keeps its original sharpness but has fewer pixels: crop the middle half out of a 1920×1080 video and you get a 960-pixel-wide clip.
Resizing changes the size of the whole frame instead. If you need a vertical 9:16 version of a landscape video without losing anything at the sides, the social media resizer can fit it into the frame over a blurred background.
Common reasons to crop
- Black bars around letterboxed films, old TV clips or screen recordings. Remove black bars samples several frames to find them for you.
- A watermark, timestamp or ticker sitting at the edge of the frame.
- Vertical video for Shorts, Reels and TikTok: lock 9:16 and slide the box over the action.
- Square or 4:5 posts for feeds that favour those shapes.
- A taskbar or menu bar you'd rather not show in a screen recording.
Getting the frame exactly right
The X, Y, width and height boxes use the pixels of the picture as you see it. Width and height are rounded to even numbers, because H.264 video can't have odd dimensions.
Click the box and use the arrow keys to move it a pixel at a time, Shift + arrows to move ten pixels, and Alt + arrows to make it bigger or smaller. The rule-of-thirds lines inside the box help you place faces and horizons where the eye expects them.
Quality, sound and phone videos
The area you keep is re-encoded as H.264 at a bitrate matched to its size, so it looks like the original. The sound comes along unchanged when it's already AAC, and is converted otherwise.
Phone videos that are stored sideways with a rotation flag are cropped as you see them, and the result is saved upright. If a video is the wrong way round to begin with, rotate it first, then crop the result.