How to Crop a Video (Without a Watermark)

A horizontal clip won't fill a vertical feed. A screen recording shows your whole desktop when you only wanted one window. The footage is 4:3 and the montage everyone else cut is 16:9. Three different annoyances, one fix: you crop the video down to the part that matters and throw the rest away. This walks through doing exactly that with the MyTools video cropper — the clicks that do it, plus the part most guides skip: which aspect ratio to pick, and why cropping is not the same as resizing.

What cropping actually does (and what it doesn't)

Cropping discards every pixel outside a rectangle. Nothing is scaled, nothing is squished, no black bars are added — the output simply is the rectangle you drew. That makes it different from two things people often confuse it with:

• Resizing keeps the entire frame but changes its dimensions. Force a 16:9 video into a 1:1 box this way and it either distorts or gets letterboxed.
• Letterboxing / pillarboxing keeps everything too, and pads the mismatch with bars.

If the subject is already somewhere in the frame and you want it to fill a new shape with no bars, that is a crop. If you need the whole picture, just smaller, that is a resize.

One consequence to know before you start: you can't crop your way to more pixels. A clip recorded at 1280×720 can't produce a sharp 1080×1920 vertical — the tallest rectangle you can draw is 720 px, so the export tops out around 405×720. Crop for framing; treat hitting an exact final resolution as a separate concern.

Cropping a video in three steps

1. Open the cropper and drop your file in

Pull up the video cropper — the upload zone is the first thing on the page. It accepts MP4, MOV, and WebM up to 500 MB, one file at a time. Drag the file onto the dashed box, or click Browse files.

The landing page is just the drop zone — there's no account screen between you and the editor.

2. Frame the part you want to keep

The editor opens on a still frame with a crop rectangle over it. Set it two ways:

• Pick a preset. 9:16 for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts; 1:1 for a square feed post; 4:5 for an Instagram portrait; 16:9 for YouTube; 4:3 for older players; or Free for anything else. The rectangle locks to that ratio so you can't accidentally drag it out of shape.
• Drag it. Grab a corner to resize, grab the middle to reposition. The area outside the rectangle dims, so you see precisely what survives.

Two details that prevent re-dos. If the opening frame is black or a title card, drag the Reference frame slider to a frame that actually shows your subject — it only changes what you're looking at while you aim; the whole clip is still cropped. And if you need exact numbers, open Advanced (pixels) and type X, Y, width, and height directly.

A 9:16 preset locked on; the dimmed sides are what gets cut, and the readout shows the exact output size.

3. Crop and save

Click Crop video. The work runs on your own machine — the file is never sent anywhere — so the first run spends a few seconds loading the in-browser video engine before it processes. What comes back is a clean MP4: no logo overlay, no bottom banner, no "free trial" stamp.

The result previews in its new shape. Download it, or start another crop with the same file.

Which ratio for which platform

Choosing the preset is the decision that actually matters. Here's what each one is for, with the resolution most platforms expect if your source is large enough to supply it:

• 9:16 — 1080 × 1920. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat. The full-screen vertical format.
• 4:5 — 1080 × 1350. In-feed Instagram and Facebook video. Taller than square, so it claims more screen as people scroll, without going fully vertical.
• 1:1 — 1080 × 1080. Square feed posts and a lot of ad placements. The safe pick when you don't know where the clip will end up.
• 16:9 — 1920 × 1080. YouTube, Vimeo, anything shown on a TV or inside a slide deck.
• 4:3 — 1440 × 1080. Older projectors, some embedded players, deliberately retro edits.

If your source is smaller than these targets, you'll get the right ratio at a lower resolution — still correct for the platform, just not as crisp.

When the file won't cooperate

It's over 500 MB or runs several minutes. Browser processing holds the video in memory, and very large files can exhaust it, phones especially. Cut it down to just the section you need with the video trimmer first, or shrink the whole thing with the video compressor — either one gets you under the limit and makes the crop faster.

The output looks a touch softer. Cropping rewrites the file, so there's a small re-encode cost. At normal viewing size it's effectively invisible; it only shows if you cut a tiny region out of a low-resolution clip and then blow it up.

I framed the wrong area. Nothing left your device and the original file is untouched — pick "Crop another video", drop the same file back in, and re-aim the rectangle.

Cropping is the right move when the subject is already in the shot and you just need everything else gone — reframing a landscape clip for a vertical feed, lifting one window out of a screen recording, matching a stray clip to the shape of a montage. When you instead need the whole frame at a different size, that's a resizer's job, not a crop's. For everything in the first group:

Open the video cropper →