Crop video

Cut a video down to the part of the frame that matters. Drag the box over the picture, keep the sound, upload nothing.

Drop your files here

.mp4, .mov, .mkv, .webm, .avi · up to 200 MB

Choose files

How to Crop the video

1
Add your video
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM or AVI, up to 200 MB and five minutes. A still from the clip appears, ready for you to draw the area over it.
2
Drag the crop frame
Pull the corners over the still to set the area, or pick a ratio and get the largest centred box that fits.
3
Click Crop and download
The result is an MP4 of just that area, the same length, with the sound intact.

Cropping is not the same as changing the ratio

Both end up with a differently shaped video, but they solve opposite problems. Cropping throws away the edges you do not want: a badly framed subject, a watermark in the corner, black bars baked into an old file. Changing the aspect ratio keeps the whole picture and adds something around it so it fits a shape a platform demands. If the important thing is inside the frame and you want it bigger, crop. If everything in the frame matters and the shape is wrong, use the aspect ratio tool. Doing the wrong one is how people end up with the top of someone's head missing on Reels.

Black bars, and why they are in the file

A widescreen film letterboxed into a 4:3 file, or a phone video someone padded to fit YouTube, carries those bars as actual pixels, and every frame spends bits encoding black. Cropping them off makes the file smaller, makes the picture fill the screen, and stops the next platform from adding a second set of bars around the first. Set the frame to the picture area and the bars are gone.

Ratios that match where the video is going

The presets are the shapes platforms ask for: 1:1 for a feed post, 4:5 for the tallest thing Instagram allows in a feed, 9:16 for Reels, Shorts and TikTok, 16:9 for YouTube and anything watched on a television, 4:3 for older material. Picking one gives you the largest box of that shape centred on the frame, which you can then drag to wherever the subject is. Free-form is there for everything else, a screen recording where only one window matters, for instance.

Sides, bitrate and sound

The box is snapped to even numbers because H.264 stores colour at half resolution and refuses odd sides outright. The bitrate is scaled down in proportion to the area you kept, so a quarter of the frame gets roughly a quarter of the bits and looks the same as it did inside the original. Cropping without scaling the bitrate would leave a small video carrying a large video's weight. The length does not change and the soundtrack comes across untouched, since cropping only concerns the picture.

The crop is drawn and applied locally

The still you drag the frame over is decoded on your device, and so is every frame of the cropped result, which your browser's own encoder writes back into an MP4. No frame is uploaded, there is no account or queue, and closing the tab clears both the clip and the crop.

Frequently asked questions

Does cropping change the length or the sound?

No. Only the picture area changes. The video runs exactly as long as before and the soundtrack is carried across as it was.

How do I get rid of black bars?

Drag the frame to the edges of the actual picture and crop. The bars are real pixels in the file, so removing them makes it smaller as well as better looking.

Why can I not make the box any size I like?

Both sides are rounded to even numbers, which H.264 requires, and the smallest allowed area is 64 × 64; below that there is nothing left worth encoding.

What is the difference from the aspect ratio tool?

Cropping removes part of the picture. Changing the aspect ratio keeps all of it and fills the space around it, with blur, colour or a centre cut. Use crop when the edges are unwanted, aspect ratio when the shape is wrong.

Does the file get smaller?

Usually yes, because the bitrate is scaled with the area you kept. A 9:16 crop out of a 16:9 video typically comes out around a third of the original size.

Which browsers does this work in?

Chrome 94 and later, Safari 26 and later, and desktop Firefox 130 and later, which have the H.264 encoder this needs. On anything else the page says so before you start.