How to Crop a Video on Windows 10/11 Easily

Summary: After testing more than 30 tools on the market, we round up 5 best ways to crop a video on Windows 10 and 11. The default Microsoft Windows video editor has yet to offer a dedicated video cropping feature, and requires some workarounds to crop the video. Check detailed steps below.

When starting to find a free video cropper tool, you might be surprised that such a basic feature is missing in many tools, including native apps such as Windows Video Editor (Photos app) and Windows Movie Maker. In this post, we will show you how to crop videos easily.

If you also have a Mac device, you can read tutorials on how to crop a video on Mac using iMovie, FCP, and QuickTime flexibly without distortion.

1. How to Crop a Video with VideoProc Converter

If you want to crop a video clip as easy as cropping a picture, with a cropping frame that allows you to adjust the size, VideoProc Converter is a life-saver. It is a light-weight and powerful video processing tool for video editing, converting, recording and downloading.

Inside the cropper panel in VideoProc Converter, you can indicate areas to keep or crop, easily change the screen size and dimensions of the video.

Follow the detailed steps below to crop a video quickly and easily:

Step 1. Install this video cropping software on your computer.

Step 2. Add the video.

• From the main screen, click Video icon, and hit the + Video icon to add a video. Choose an output format, such as MP4, MOV, MKV, etc.
• VideoProc Converter supports 370+ input formats, you can crop MP4 videos, MKV, MOV, AVI, rare formats and demanding codec such as HEVC videos.

Step 3. Use the Crop tool from the toolbar.

• Click the Crop icon to call out the editing window and tick the Enable Crop box to crop videos.
• Use Free Preset to drag the cropping box flexibly.
• You can also click the Preset icon and crop video at a fixed aspect ratio, such as 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, etc.

Step 4. Export the cropped video.

Once you are happy with the result, click Done to save the editing.

On the right-side panel, you can click Browse to indicate the export path, tick the box to use High Quality Engine, and hit Run to export the video.

Video Tutorial on How to Crop a Video:

Can I use VideoProc Converter on a Slow PC?

Yes. VideoProc Converter only requires the minimum 1GB RAM and 200MB hard disk space. Even an old notebook can effortlessly run it without a glitch.

Free Download For Win 7 or later

Free Download For Mac OS X 10.6 or later

For mobile users, click here >

2. How to Crop a Video Using Windows Video Editor

Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a native video editor that comes along with the system. You can find it in the Windows Start menu, or launch it from the Photos App > Video Editor.

Note:

The Windows Video Editor can crop video by removing black bars, converting 16:9 to 4:3, and changing horizontal video to vertical 9:16 or 3:4.

However, it doesn't allow you to freely adjust a cropping box to crop the video frame on Windows 10, nor does it enable you to decide the area to be shown by changing the position of the footage. Therefore, strictly speaking, you can't really crop a video in Windows Video Editor. It only works under very restricted situations.

Step 1. Open Windows Video Editor on Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating system.

Here are several ways to launch the Windows Video Editor on Windows 11/10.

• You can click the Windows Start menu, and type in Video Editor to launch it.
• Alternatively, you can open the Windows Photos App, go to more, and click Video Editor.
• You can also directly right-click on the video > Open with > Photos. Then Click Add to in the photos app, and choose to add to new video or existing video, then click View to launch the project.

Step 2. Create a New Project, and import video clips that you want to crop.

Step 3. Drag the newly added clips to the storyboard at the bottom.

• If you only want to crop one video, drag it to the first storyboard.
• If you add multiple clips to the storyboard (the cards at the bottom), these videos will be merged into one upon exporting.

Step 4. Use Windows Video Editor to crop video.

• If you want to crop the black bars, click the frame-shaped icon on the right side of the speed icon.
• If you want to crop the video to a different aspect ratio, click the three-dot icon in the top right corner, and change 16:9 to 4:3. Under the same menu, you can also make a landscape video vertical.

Step 5. Click the Share icon to save the video.

Note: Based on our tests, videos processed by the Windows Video Editor will end up large in file size. This is probably because this default editor doesn't apply an efficient compression algorithm to reduce unnecessary data. Plus, if you want to crop videos in bulk, you need to create a project for each video manually.

3. How to Crop a Video in PowerPoint on Windows 10

Although many users already know that we can crop a video in Windows 10 using PowerPoint, how to export the cropped video with PowerPoint is unmentioned in many tutorials. In fact, it is tricky to export and save the cropped video, since there isn't a direct option.

Follow the steps below to check how the trick is completed when cropping a video in PowerPoint.

Step 1. Launch PowerPoint in Windows 10 (Windows 11) to insert the video.

Click Insert > Video > Video on PC, browser and find the video you need to crop, and insert it into the PowerPoint slide.

Make sure you only have one and only slide in PowerPoint, instead of multiple slides.

Tips: There are chances when PowerPoint won't insert a video, saying "PowerPoint cannot insert a video from the selected file. Verify that the necessary codec for this media format is installed, and then try again." It means the codec of the source video is not supported by your PowerPoint version. For instance, PowerPoint 2013 or 2010 cannot insert and playback MPEG-2 encoded videos.

H264 MP4 video (AAC audio) has the best compatibility with PowerPoint. If you have other video formats, refer to method 1 which supports all the popular and rare codecs, way more than PowerPoint.

Step 2. Crop the video in PowerPoint.

• To do so, you need to click on the video clip to make sure it is selected, and click Crop under the Format tab.
• You shall see a cropping frame appearing around the edges of the video. Drag and resize it to decide the areas to crop.
• Click Crop again to confirm removing the unwanted parts.

Step 3. Adjust the size of the video to fill the full slide.

Step 4. Export the cropped video.

Click the File > Export > Create a Video, and choose the video specification. Depending on your PowerPoint version, the available resolutions can be different. For instance, PowerPoint 2013 only supports up to 720p, while higher versions have 1080p and even 4K videos.

Tips: PowerPoint can be slow when exporting the video. If you see the video file in the destination folder, but are prompted with a notice "This file is locked by another app at the moment", it means the video conversion is still in process, and the MP4 video you are seeing now is merely a temporary file. Wait patiently for the PowerPoint to finish cropping and exporting the video. Then you shall be able to playback the cropped video.

As you may already notice, this PowerPoint Cropping trick works because it is turning the slideshow into a video, and the inserted video happens to be part of that slide. For that reason, if you want to crop a video into a square format, you may find PowerPoint's function limited. Because it depends on the shape of the slide page instead of depending on the embedded video.

4. How to Crop a Video Using Windows Movie Maker

Many tutorials claim that Windows Movie Maker can help you to crop a video on Windows 10, but when you follow the guide step by step, you will find that they are actually talking about trimming, or cutting out a section to shorten the video.

In fact, Windows Movie Maker does not have a cropping tool, but you can circumvent it. The workaround is to zoom in on the clip. The result? A video zoomed in. In this sense, even if you didn't actually crop and remove the unwanted area, the output file still fulfills your needs.

Step 1. Install and launch Windows Movie Maker.

Step 2. Drag your footage into the working area, and click Animations tab from the menu bar.

Step 3. Crop video frame by selecting the first effects from the section featuring "Zoom in" effects.

Step 4. Set the Duration time. Make sure it lasts long enough to cover the entire footage.

Step 5. Playback and check if the unwanted areas are cropped by zooming in.

Tips: Since the zoom-in is a process, the beginning part of the video will still stay not cropped, you can then trim off the beginning part, so that the rest of the content is zoomed in.

5. How to Crop a Video on Windows with Online Tools

Sometimes you only want to crop a video on Windows quickly, without installing the software, and that's when the online video croppers come into your aid.

Ezgif.com

Ezgif offers both a graphic crop tool and a pixel crop tool for those who prefer entering specific parameters manually to crop. Users can also lock the aspect ratio to one of the presets to make the video square, 4:3, 16:9, 3:2 and many more. Upon cropping, you can also choose to encode the file in MP4 H264/AAC.

Step 1. Drag and drop a video to the processing panel and click upload. Or you can click "upload" to select video file directly.

Step 2. Select an area for cropping in the graphical crop tool or input pixels in the corresponding dimensions.

Step 3. Click to confirm and download the video by hitting Save button.

Cons of Ezgif.com:

• No progress bar – you cannot pause, fast-forward, backward, or pinpoint to a single frame for cropping.
• No voice control – you cannot mute the video during cropping.

Online-video-cutter.com

Online video cutter covers the utilities of a cropper, cutter, trimmer, rotator, etc. Totally free and no watermark.

Step 1: Drop a video file to the working panel directly without signing up.

Step 2: Locate a frame where you want to make sure that certain parts can be removed from the original video.

Step 3: Click "Save" button on the right lower corner and then wait for the Download button to show up.

Step 4: Simply click the Download button to download the cropped video.

In the meantime, you can trim and rotate the video the way you like and even choose the quality settings to force it not re-encoding and remaining the same quality as original. For a single video cropping tool online, I'd say that online-video-cutter.com might be the best of its kind at this moment.

Clideo.com

Clideo is a popular online video editor, with features to trim, cut, rotate and crop videos. It offers 4 default aspect ratios to crop a video, namely, 1:1, 16:9, 9:16 and 5:4. With the fixed aspect ratio, such as using 1:1, you can freely adjust the box size while keeping it a square for Instagram post.

Step1: Upload video to the crop video page on Clideo.

You can drag and drop videos there to upload, or import from Dropbox or Google Drive.

Step 2: Drag the cropping frame to crop the video.

Step 3: Select an output format, such as MP4.

Clideo also supports videos in 3G2, 3GP, AVI, ASF, F4V, FLV, M2TS, MKV, MP4, MOV, MTS, etc.

Step 4: Click the Export button to save the cropped video.

Before saving it to the local drive, you can also continue editing, using tools in Clideo to merge videos, add subtitles, or compress videos.

Note: For free account users, Clideo will place a watermark in the bottom right corner of the cropped video.

Cropping a Video on Windows 10/11 Using Desktop Software vs Online Tools

Although cropping videos online could be seemly burden-less and quick, it could be slower than you imagine during uploading, processing and downloading, especially under bad network conditions, and batch tasks are not supported.

To easily and quickly crop video on Windows without watermark, you can use VideoProc Converter which was introduced in the first method. Click the buttons below to download VideoProc Converter to crop video on Windows 10/8/7 and Windows 11, Mac version is also supported.