Crop a video to 9:16

TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are all vertical, 9:16, and a landscape clip posted as it is shows up as a thin strip with black bars. Cropping it to 9:16 fills the whole phone screen instead.

Drop the video and a frame from it appears with a 9:16 box already in the middle. Drag the box sideways to keep the person or the action in shot, then press Crop. The video is cut to that area and encoded again in your browser, sound included.

The video is never uploaded, there is no watermark, and the limit on its length or size is your device’s memory (phones hold less).

The box stays in one place for the whole clip; it does not follow a moving subject. Before cropping, play the original through and watch where the action goes. If someone walks across the frame, a 9:16 slice will lose them for part of the clip, so either trim to the part where they stay in one area or place the box where they spend most of the time. The still you frame on is taken about a second into the video, so check the rest of the clip too.

Resolution matters more than usual, because a 9:16 crop keeps less than a third of a landscape frame's width. From 1080p footage the crop is 608×1080, which TikTok and Reels enlarge to fill the screen, so it can look softer than video filmed upright. From 4K footage the same crop is 1216×2160, sharper than a full HD phone recording. If you know a landscape shot will end up vertical, film it in 4K and crop it here.