# Crop Video

Crop a video to square, portrait or widescreen for social, or to exact pixels. Free, no watermark, and the video is never uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/crop-video

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV in, MP4 out. Square, 9:16, 4:5 and 16:9 presets, or exact pixels.
- Limits: Both dimensions are kept even, because H.264 stores colour at half resolution in each direction and an odd size has no valid chroma plane. Enlarging is not offered; a crop only ever removes.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### Why ratios instead of dragging a box?

Because almost nobody crops a video to an arbitrary rectangle. What people do is take a landscape recording and make it fit a portrait slot, or square it for a feed, and those are four fixed shapes. Picking the shape and then which part of the frame to keep takes two clicks, where a drag handle takes a fiddly minute and lands on something like 1079 by 1437.

### Which ratio does each platform want?

9:16 for Reels, Shorts and TikTok, which fill a phone screen. 1:1 or 4:5 for a feed post, where 4:5 is the tallest a feed will show without cropping it again. 16:9 for anything played in a normal video player. The page names each one so you do not have to remember which is which.

### Why does this take longer than rotating a video?

Because rotating is a note in the file saying which way up it is, and the picture is copied untouched. Cropping genuinely changes every frame, so all of them have to be decoded and encoded again. That is the difference between seconds and minutes on a long recording.

### Will the file get smaller?

Usually, because there are fewer pixels to encode and the bitrate is scaled by the area kept rather than held at the source's. Holding it would leave a half-size video carrying twice the bits per pixel it needs, which is a bigger file than the picture justifies.

### Can I crop and also keep the whole picture visible?

No, and nothing can: those are opposite requests. Cropping removes what falls outside the rectangle. If you need the whole frame inside a different shape, what you want is padding, which adds bars rather than taking picture away, and that is a different operation.

## Related tools

- [Rotate Video](https://filetity.com/rotate-video): Turn a video a quarter, half or three quarter turn, losslessly.
- [Compress video](https://filetity.com/compress-video): Make a video smaller without uploading it anywhere.