How to crop a video
- Drop your video into the box or choose it. Add several at once and each one is cropped to the same shape.
- Pick a Shape. A box shows the part that stays; drag it left or right (or up and down) to keep the part you want. The cropped video plays next to the original so you can check nothing important was lost.
- Download the cropped video.
What each shape keeps
Cropping never adds anything, it only cuts away the edges. Here is what’s left of a standard 1920 × 1080 landscape video with each shape:
| Shape | Result | What it’s used for |
|---|---|---|
| Square 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 | Feed posts and profile videos |
| Vertical 9:16 | 608 × 1080 | Stories and short-form video apps |
| Portrait 4:5 | 864 × 1080 | Feed posts that take up more of the screen than a square |
| Wide 16:9 | 1920 × 1080 (unchanged) | Video sites, TVs and laptop screens |
| 4:3 | 1440 × 1080 | Older TV-style footage and slideshows |
Going from landscape to vertical keeps less than a third of the width, so a wide shot loses most of the scene. A phone video filmed upright already fills 9:16, and cropping it to square cuts from the top and bottom instead.
Tips for a good crop
- Frame for the crop. If you know a clip is going to end up square or vertical, keep the person or object you care about in the middle when you film. The box can follow a subject that stays to one side, but not one that moves across the frame.
- Rotate first. The crop works on the picture as it plays. If the video shows sideways, rotate it before cropping, or the wrong edges get cut.
- Make it smaller afterwards. Cropping keeps the original sharpness, so the file can still be large. Resize the video to 720p or compress it if you need to send it.