Free · centre-cropped · nothing uploads
Crop video online
Reframe a landscape clip for vertical feeds, or square it off for an ad placement. Pick the shape and the crop is computed to the exact pixel.
Cropping and resizing are not the same thing
They get used interchangeably and they do opposite things. Resizing keeps the whole frame and changes how many pixels it is drawn with — nothing is lost, the picture just gets smaller. Cropping keeps the pixel density and throws away everything outside a smaller rectangle. When a platform wants vertical video and your footage is landscape, only cropping actually gets you there; resizing would just hand back a smaller landscape clip.
The practical consequence is that framing matters before you shoot. A subject centred in a 16:9 frame survives a 9:16 crop comfortably. A two-shot with people at either edge does not — you will lose one of them, and no tool can invent the pixels back.
Why the output dimensions are always even
H.264 video with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling stores colour at half resolution horizontally and vertically, which means both dimensions have to divide by two. A crop that worked out to 601 pixels wide would simply fail to encode, so the box is rounded down to the nearest even number on both axes before the frame is cut.
Frequently asked questions
- Which shape do I need for which platform?
- 9:16 is the full-screen vertical used by TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Stories. 4:5 is the tall format the Instagram feed allows, which takes up more screen than a square without being full-height. 1:1 is square, still common for profile and ad placements. 16:9 is standard landscape for YouTube and most players.
- Does cropping cut off the sides of my video?
- Yes — that is what cropping means. Going from a 16:9 landscape clip to 9:16 vertical keeps a tall strip from the middle and discards the rest, so anything important near the left or right edge will be lost. If you need the whole frame to survive, resize instead: it keeps everything and adds no crop.
- Where does it crop from?
- The centre. The tool takes the largest rectangle of your chosen shape that fits inside the source frame and centres it on both axes, which is the right guess for most footage because subjects tend to sit near the middle.
- Is my video uploaded anywhere?
- No. VidClip runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside your browser. The file is read from your disk into the page's memory, processed there, and saved back to your disk. There is no upload, no server queue, and no copy of your footage anywhere but your machine.