Video Cropper
Cut away the parts of the picture you do not want: black bars, a messy background, a watermark at the edge, or extra space around the subject. Draw the crop on a frame of the video, choose a ratio if you need one, and download the cropped MP4.
- Files stay on your device
- No sign-up
- Free to use
Crop area
Aspect ratio
Output
Processing happens on your device with FFmpeg. Keep this tab open; long or high-resolution videos can take several minutes.
How to use Video Cropper
- Drop a video onto the upload area. A frame from the start appears with a crop box.
- Play or scrub the video to a representative moment and select Use frame at playhead if you want a different frame to work on.
- Drag the box and its handles over the area to keep. Lock a ratio such as 1:1, 9:16 or 16:9 if the result must have a specific shape.
- Select Crop video and download the result.
Video Cropper features
Visual crop on a real frame
Draw the crop directly on a still from your video, from any moment you choose.
Aspect ratio presets
Free, square, vertical 9:16, widescreen 16:9, 4:5 and 4:3.
Pixel-accurate output
Crop dimensions are rounded to even numbers as required by the H.264 format, and shown before processing.
Audio kept or removed
Keep the soundtrack or remove it in the same step.
Universal MP4
H.264 and AAC output plays on every device and platform.
Private processing
The video is processed by FFmpeg in your browser.
When to use Video Cropper
- Removing black bars from letterboxed or pillarboxed footage.
- Cropping a screen recording to a single window or app.
- Turning a landscape clip into a square or vertical video by keeping only the subject.
- Cutting a distracting element out of the edge of the frame.
- Zooming in on a detail of a presentation or lecture recording.
Video Cropper FAQ
Does cropping reduce the video quality?
Cropping keeps the remaining pixels, but the video must be re-encoded, which applies normal compression. At the default quality the difference is hard to see. The cropped video has fewer pixels, so it looks less detailed if enlarged to full screen.
Why are my crop dimensions slightly different from what I drew?
H.264 video with standard colour sampling requires even widths and heights, so the crop is rounded down to the nearest even number of pixels.
How is this different from the Video Resizer?
Cropping removes part of the picture without scaling. Resizing changes the number of pixels of the whole picture. To make a vertical video from landscape footage with the full picture visible, use the Video Resizer or TikTok Video Resizer instead.
Can the crop move during the video?
No. The same area is cropped from every frame. For moving subjects, choose an area that contains the subject throughout.
What formats can I upload?
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI and other common formats. The output is always MP4.
Cropping video, frame by frame
A video is a sequence of images, and cropping it means applying the same rectangle to every one of them. FFmpeg’s crop filter does exactly that, keeping a region defined by its width, height and top-left corner. Because compressed video stores most frames as differences from earlier frames, the cropped result cannot simply be cut out of the original file; every frame is decoded, cropped and encoded again.
Choosing the right frame to draw on matters. A single still might not show where the subject moves later. Scrub through the video before cropping and check the moments where the action reaches the edges, then use the frame at the playhead to position the box.
Letterboxing, the black bars above and below a picture, often appears when widescreen video is placed inside a 4:3 frame or a phone records a screen. Pillarboxing is the vertical equivalent at the sides. Cropping these bars away recovers the true picture and lets the video fill the screen properly on the target device.
If you need the result at a particular size as well, crop first to the correct ratio here, then resize with the Video Resizer. Doing it in this order avoids distorting the picture.