How to crop a video for social platforms
Upload
Load landscape or portrait source material.
Pick aspect preset
Choose 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, or drag a custom rectangle.
Position the frame
Center faces or products inside the crop box.
Export
FFmpeg crops and re-encodes to your selected dimensions.
Verify on phone
Open the output on mobile to confirm important content stays in frame.
Common use cases
Landscape to Shorts
Turn webinar recordings into vertical clips without re-shooting.
Remove black bars
Eliminate letterboxing from old downloads or screen caps.
Product focus
Tighten frame on the item when the camera was too wide.
Talking-head social
Keep eyes in the upper third for 9:16 Reels.
Best practices
- Shoot 4K when possible — cropping throws away pixels; higher source resolution keeps sharpness.
- Leave headroom for platform UI overlays (like buttons on Shorts).
- Pair with compress when vertical exports are too large for DM limits.
- Rotate first if the clip is sideways, then crop.
- Trim dead air before cropping to save encode time.
Formats & compatibility
Exports MP4 (H.264). Crop dimensions depend on preset and source resolution. Extreme crops on 720p sources may look soft on large displays — prefer higher-resolution masters.
Related tools
- Rotate & flip — fix orientation before cropping
- Social compressor — shrink vertical exports for messaging
- Trimmer — shorten before reframing
Choose a preset above and export platform-ready framing in one pass.