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Video Cropper

Crop Video to Square, Vertical or Widescreen and Slide to Frame the Subject

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How the Video Cropper works

This video cropper cuts a clip down to a new shape, such as a square for a feed post or a 9:16 vertical for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Pick the shape, slide the crop to where the action is, press Render and download. Everything runs in your browser, with no upload.

Every platform has a favourite shape. A landscape clip posted as a Reel shows up as a thin strip with black above and below; a vertical phone video on YouTube gets pillarboxed. Cropping trades some of the picture for a frame that fills the screen.

How the video cropper works

The tool finds the largest rectangle of your chosen shape that fits inside the video, then places it using the two position sliders. At 50% and 50% the crop is centred. Horizontal 0% pins it to the left edge and 100% to the right; vertical works the same from top to bottom. Usually only one slider matters: cropping a landscape clip to 9:16 removes width, so only the horizontal slider moves it.

Each frame is drawn through that rectangle onto a canvas and recorded with MediaRecorder. The output is the crop's own size in pixels, so nothing is scaled up and no sharpness is lost.

How much of the picture each crop keeps

Starting from a standard 16:9 landscape video, 1920 × 1080:

Shape Output size Picture kept
21:9 cinema 1920 × 822 76%
16:9 widescreen 1920 × 1080 100%
4:3 classic 1440 × 1080 75%
1:1 square 1080 × 1080 56%
4:5 portrait 864 × 1080 45%
9:16 vertical 608 × 1080 32%

Cropping 16:9 to 9:16 keeps under a third of the frame and leaves a 608-pixel-wide video. For a sharp vertical, either shoot vertically or use the padder, which keeps the whole picture.

Where each shape is used

Tips and pitfalls

Find the subject first. Scrub the preview to the busiest moment and set the sliders for that, because the crop stays fixed for the whole clip.

Moving subjects can leave the frame. A fixed crop cannot follow someone walking across the shot. Trim to the part where they stay put, or use a wider shape.

Black bars already in the video? Run remove black bars first so the crop measures the real picture rather than the bars.

How to read the result

The stats show the source size, the crop's size and its top-left corner in source pixels, and what share of the original frame survived.

FAQ

How do I crop a landscape video to vertical?

Choose 9:16 vertical and drag the horizontal slider until the subject is in the middle of the crop. The vertical slider has no effect here, because the full height of the video is kept.

Does cropping lower the quality?

Only slightly. The crop is output at its own pixel size, so nothing is stretched, but the video is re-encoded at about 6 Mbit/s. That is close to the source for phone footage.

Is my video uploaded?

No. The browser crops and records the video on your own device. Nothing is sent to a server, and the page keeps working if you go offline after it loads.

Can I crop without losing any of the picture?

Not by cropping, which by definition removes the edges. The square and story padder fits the whole frame into the new shape and fills the gaps with a blurred copy or a solid colour instead.

See also: all Video & Screen tools, Images, Audio, PDF, SVG, Simulations & Screensavers, Generative Art, Chart Makers, 3D Model Viewers, Drawing Pads, Mockups & 3D Making, Diagram Makers, 3D Science, Tracker Music.

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