Crop Video

Is cropping the same as resizing?

No, and the difference matters. Cropping cuts pixels away — it changes the shape of the frame and throws out whatever falls outside the box, so a wide clip becomes a square by losing its sides. Resizing keeps the whole frame and scales it to fewer pixels, changing the size but not the shape. Reach for cropping when the *aspect ratio* is wrong for where the video is going; reach for resize when the frame is the right shape but too large.

Which aspect ratio does each platform want?

Every social platform frames video differently, and posting the wrong ratio means ugly bars or an automatic crop that chops off heads. Crop deliberately so you control what stays in frame.

How do you avoid cutting off the subject?

The single biggest risk when cropping wide footage to vertical is losing the subject off the side. A few habits help:

• Position the crop box on the subject before you export, not on the centre by default.
• When cropping 16:9 down to 9:16 you keep only the middle third — make sure the action lives there.
• Leave a little headroom so faces are not pinned to the top edge.
• If the subject moves across the frame, a fixed crop cannot follow them; trim to a steadier section first with trim video.

What are the browser limits?

Cropping re-encodes every frame, so it runs at the same single-threaded WebAssembly speed as compression — fine for a short social clip, slow for anything long, and memory-bound on very large files. That is the honest trade for a private, install-free tool: keep the input to the length you would actually post, and the workbench will warn you and let you cancel if a file is too big.

Is my video uploaded to crop it?

No. The crop runs in your browser through ffmpeg.wasm — your file is processed in memory and handed back as a download, never uploaded. Check DevTools → Network to confirm no request is made, and note it keeps working with the internet disconnected once loaded. Your footage stays private.

Related video and subtitle tools

If the frame is upright but sideways, rotate the video first. To shrink the cropped clip for upload, compress it or resize it. And once it is framed for vertical, add subtitles — captions lift watch time on muted mobile feeds — or prepare them first with the subtitle converter.