You’ve taken a great video, but you want to crop out part of it that’s distracting and not wanted?
No problem!
I’ve got the how-to easy to follow steps how you can crop a video on ANY iphone! You don’t need any extra apps and it’s free to crop as many times as you need to. Actually, I bet it’s already on your iPhone and you probably didn’t even notice :).
Ready? Lets go.
How to crop a video on iPhone
1.Open the video you want to crop in the Photos app
2. Tap Edit in the top right corner of the screen
3. Tap on the crop icon at the bottom of the screen
4. Adjust the crop size
5. Tap Done
Cropping? Trimming? Rotating? What’s the difference?
- Cropping – Reducing the overall viewing area of the video, but still keeping the same length.
- Trimming – Reducing the length of the video, usually by adjusting the start and end points.
- Rotating – Turning the entire video clockwise or counter-clockwise, not effecting the viewing area or length.
What Cropping A Video Will Do
When you crop a video, you’re reducing the viewable area of the original recording. If you have an object in the video recording that you want to remove, it has to be stationary inside the shot, or the object should remain on one part of the video.
You’re not able to move the crop to another area once you’ve saved the edits, so if the object you want to remove is moving all over the video screen, you won’t be able to fully remove it.
Cropping a video works the same was as cropping a picture, you’re only allowing a specific area to be seen.
How To Crop A Video On iPhone
Here’s the step by step guide to cropping a video on any iPhone. Just be sure your iPhone software is up to date as video cropping was only added after iOS 13.
Open the photos app and located the video
Tap Edit in the top right corner
To show you how to crop a video on an iPhone, I made a test video (of some leaves!) and accidentally on purpose put my hand into the shot.
The first thing you want to do is tap Edit that’s in the top right corner of the screen.
Tap the Crop button on the bottom of the screen
At the bottom of your iPhone screen, you’ll see some menu icons. The one you’re looking for is shaped like a candy wrapper on it’s side and two arrows pointing in a circle direction.
You can do a lot more here than just cropping a video, but today let’s focus on that. Go ahead and tap it.
Find the crop handle near the edge of the screen
After you tap the crop button, you’ll see four corners on your video have a thicker edge. These are crop adjustment handles and you can tap and drag them as much as you need.
You can crop a video both vertically and horizontally, but keep in mind you could end up with a very narrow or thin video if you crop too much.
Here’s how my demo video looked after dragging the crop handles at the bottom, upward.
If you’ve moved the crop handles and the video looks good, you can skip this next step.
You don’t have to, but I’d recommend you use the original aspect ratio to crop your video, so your cropped video still looks good on any screen – and not narrow or thin.
Use the original aspect ratio for best results
To keep the video looking good, you can keep the height and width of the video a certain distance apart, but still focus the video on the area you want and avoid the object you want removed.
To do this tap the Aspect Ratio button at the top right corner of the screen.
This button opens the aspect ratio menu and locks the height and width ratios of the canvas.
It keeps the video looking tall and thin, like the original, but you can crop out the object you don’t want visible.
Select the Original option from the bottom menu choices.
Drag the crop handles over the object you want to remove
Use any one of the four crop handles by tapping and holding your finger on them and moving it over the object you want to remove.
You can always tap Cancel if things to wrong, so don’t worry too much if you get a bit too close and cut off part of something you didn’t want!
Save your crop or reset to re-do
If the crop you just made to your video looks good, tap the Done button at the bottom right of the screen.
To re-do the crop, just tap the RESET button that’s at the top of the screen in the middle.
Compare a Freeform crop against an Original Aspect Ratio crop
Here’s the same screen shot of my demo video with two kinds of crops.
#1 – The original video, no cropping and hand still visible.
#2 – A freeform crop, where I dragged the bottom crop handle upwards to remove the hand.
#3 – An original aspect ratio crop, where the height and width stayed proportionally the same.
Should I use Freeform Crop or Original Aspect Ratio Crop on iPhone?
It depends what you’re planning on using the video for.
If it’s an every day video to share with friends or post to Facebook – nothing super important – I’d say just freeform crop out the object you don’t want.
Using original aspect ratio will look like the video was zoomed in and could take away from what the original video was about. Sometimes it’s about the setting of the video and you want to show as much of the original as you can.
If you’re thinking about posting it to YouTube or Instagram, make sure you crop the video to an aspect ratio that’ll work for the platform you want to share it on. Instagram videos are square. YouTube videos are rectangular. You can select different aspect ratios easily, so it’s no problem, but take that into account when you’re cropping your video.
Not Seeing The Video Crop Button On Your iPhone?
Check to make sure you’re upto date with the latest operating system for your iPhone. The operating system iPhones use is called iOS and the video crop feature was only added after iOS 13.
If you have any questions or need more help, just leave a comment below.