How to crop a video for free

To crop a video for free on Windows, open it in Cut by Zaweba, go to the Filters tab and draw the crop straight onto the preview. Eight drag handles let you pull each edge and corner into place, and dragging inside the box moves the whole crop. Then save through the Convert tab and only the framed area is kept.

Cut by Zaweba is free software under the EULA. It runs offline on your own PC, so the video never goes anywhere and you don't need an account.

What you need

Just the video and Cut. It opens MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, WebM, WMV, MTS, M2TS, TS, FLV, GIF, M4V, MPG and 3GP files, so most clips from phones, cameras and screen recorders will load. Use Open, drag the file onto the window, or pick it from the recent files.

Cropping is a good fix for a handful of common problems: black bars around an old recording, a stranger at the edge of the frame, a messy desk at the bottom of a screen recording, or a wide shot where the interesting part is only in the middle.

Cropping a clip, step by step

Open the video and step to a frame that shows the problem clearly. If the thing you want to lose only appears for a moment, find that moment first, because it is much easier to judge a crop when you can see what you're cutting away.

Go to the Filters tab and draw the crop on the preview. A box appears with handles on each corner and each side. Pull the edges in until only the part you want is inside. If the size is right but the position isn't, drag from inside the box to slide it across.

Cut keeps the crop in the video's own pixels and rounds it to even numbers. You don't need to do anything about that; it is simply what most video formats expect, and it means the saved file plays properly everywhere.

Before saving, scrub through the clip once. A crop that looks perfect on one frame can clip someone's head when they stand up a few seconds later.

When you're happy, go to the Convert tab and choose what the video is for, such as For WhatsApp, For YouTube 1080p, Small file or Best quality. The estimated size and the encoder Cut will use are shown before you start. Only the kept parts of the video are converted, in one pass, with the crop and any other filters applied.

Framing tips

Crop first and resize later. If you crop away a third of the picture and then pick a preset, Cut can work out a sensible size from what's left, rather than shrinking a full frame and then throwing part of it away.

Keep an eye on shape. A very narrow crop of a wide video gives a tall, thin picture, which suits a phone screen but looks odd on a television. If the picture is the wrong way round as well, rotate it in the same Filters tab before you settle on the crop.

Don't crop too tight. People move, cameras wobble, and a little space around the subject looks more natural than a frame that touches the top of someone's hair.

Cropping more than one video

The crop belongs to the video you drew it on. If you add files to the batch queue from the Batch tab, the current filters are applied to them but the crop is left off. That is deliberate, because a crop drawn for one clip rarely fits another. For a set of clips that each need cropping, open each one, draw its crop and add it to the queue with Ctrl+B. The queue runs in the background and carries on after a restart.

Other ways to do it

You can crop in a full timeline editor such as Video by Zaweba, and Cut has File, then Open in Video by Zaweba, when Video is installed. That suits a project with titles and several tracks. For a single clip that just needs its edges trimmed, Cut is quicker: draw the box, pick a preset and save.