Empty cinema auditorium, red seats either side of a lit centre aisle, wide and waiting to be recut
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All tools / Crop and Resize

Crop and Resize.

One landscape cut, four platforms. No black bars, no text behind the buttons.

→ Open the reframerFree, no account, and your video is never uploaded

How it works.

Reshape a wide video into a square post or a tall reel.

  1. Step 1

    Drag your video in

    Or click to choose a file. It stays on your device.

  2. Step 2

    Pick a ratio and drag the frame

    9:16, 1:1, 4:5, or 16:9.

  3. Step 3

    Save the cropped video

    One click, and it downloads.

In detail

You shot it wide because that is how cameras work, and now it has to be a Reel, a square, a 4:5 and a 16:9, and every one of those is a different decision about what stays in the frame. Most tools answer that by pasting your landscape clip into a tall black box, which is why so many reposts look like a screenshot of a screenshot. This one crops instead: pick a ratio, drag the frame over the part that matters, and export a file that is genuinely 9:16 with nothing letterboxed. The frame is live over your own footage, so you can scrub to the middle of the clip and check that the subject has not walked out of it. And because a vertical feed puts a caption, a sound name and a rail of buttons on top of your picture, the safe zones for TikTok, Reels and Shorts are drawn right inside the frame while you position it, so your title does not end up behind the share button. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is watermarked, and the audio comes out the other side untouched.

What it gives you.

  • Four ratios, one click each

    9:16 for Reels, TikTok, and Shorts, 1:1 for the Instagram feed and LinkedIn, 4:5 for an Instagram portrait post, and 16:9 for YouTube and X. Each one says which platforms it serves, so you are choosing a destination rather than doing arithmetic.

  • A frame you drag, over your own footage

    The crop is drawn on the real picture, not a thumbnail: drag inside it to pan, use the zoom slider or the wheel to go tighter, nudge it with the arrow keys, and scrub the clip underneath to check that your subject is still inside it at the ten second mark.

  • TikTok, Reels, and Shorts safe zones

    The status bar, the caption row, and the action rail are drawn hatched inside the crop frame while you position it. They move with the frame, they are labelled, and they are honestly marked as approximate, because every platform moves its interface.

  • Blurred fill when nothing can be cut

    Some shots have the subject at both edges and no crop is right. Blur fill keeps the whole picture, fits it in the middle of the new frame, and fills the margins with a blurred, scaled copy of the same shot. Better than black bars, and it is one chip away.

  • The audio is not touched

    Reframing is a picture operation, so the sound is copied through as the same encoded packets whenever the container will carry them. No generation loss on the audio, and no surprise re-encode.

  • Runs in your browser, no watermark

    The decode, the crop, and the encode all happen here in a worker on your machine, so the file never leaves it. There is no account, no queue page, and no stamped corner, at any size.

Straight answers.

Why does my Reel have black bars?

Because something padded your landscape video instead of cropping it. A 16:9 clip is 1.78 times wider than it is tall and a Reel frame is 0.56 times as wide as it is tall, so the two shapes cannot both be satisfied: either the sides of the picture go, or the top and bottom of the frame get filled with something. Most tools fill it with black, because that is the one-line answer, and Instagram then shows your video as a small strip in the middle of a tall dark rectangle. Cropping is the fix, and it is a real choice rather than a default, which is why this tool puts a frame on the picture and lets you decide what stays.

Which ratio should I use for which platform?

9:16 for anything that plays full screen in a vertical feed: Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, and Snapchat. 1:1 for a square post in the Instagram or Facebook feed and for LinkedIn video, where a square takes more of the screen than a landscape clip while scrolling. 4:5 for an Instagram feed post when you want the tallest thing the feed allows without going to Reels. 16:9 for YouTube proper, for X, and for anything that will be watched on a laptop. If you only make one, make the 9:16: it is the only shape that fills a phone.

Where exactly does the TikTok interface cover the video?

Roughly the top tenth, for the status bar and the search row; the bottom quarter, for the username, the caption, and the sound name, with the navigation bar under that; and a strip about a seventh of the width down the right side, from around a third of the way down to around four fifths, which is the profile, like, comment, and share rail. Reels and Shorts are similar with slightly less at the top and slightly more at the bottom. Those are the numbers the overlays here draw, and they are deliberately labelled approximate: the apps redesign constantly and the exact heights change with the phone. Treat them as a keep-out area with a margin, not a pixel guarantee.

Does cropping a video lose quality?

The crop itself loses nothing, but the re-encode does. Changing the shape of the picture means the frames have to be decoded, redrawn, and encoded again, and every encode costs a little. This aims high, at about 0.12 bits per pixel at the output size, which for a 9:16 crop of 1080p footage is around 2.4 Mbps, and it will never spend more bits than the source itself carried, so you cannot accidentally inflate a file. In practice one careful pass is invisible on a phone screen. What you actually lose in a crop is picture: the sides you cut off are gone from that export, and that is the trade you are choosing.

Can I upscale my crop to 1080x1920?

You can, and by default it will not. A 9:16 crop of a 1080p landscape clip is only 608 pixels wide, so exporting it at 1080x1920 means stretching every frame by 1.78 times: the file gets three times bigger and not one pixel of detail is added. Instagram and TikTok both re-encode what you upload anyway, and they are perfectly happy with a 608x1080 file. So the default is fit source, and the platform size is a chip you can pick with the upscale factor named next to it, for the times when something downstream insists on the exact dimensions. If you want a genuinely sharp 1080x1920, the answer is a taller crop of higher resolution footage, not an upscale.

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