Crop and reframe a video

How cropping works here, honestly

Most croppers let you draw a box on the video. Octoolo has no crop box you can drag to any size yet. Instead, the finished video has a fixed shape, and each clip is placed in it:

• Fit, with bars shows the whole picture, with bars wherever it does not reach the edges.
• Fill, cut edges scales the picture until there are no bars; whatever spills over the frame is cut off.
• Zoom, from 50% to 300%, makes the picture smaller or larger inside the frame.
• Left and right and Up and down choose which part stays in view.

Together these cover the crops people usually want: a vertical cut of a landscape video, a square for a post, a tighter shot of one person, an edge you would rather not show. What they cannot do is cut an exact rectangle, such as 640 × 360 pixels from the top left corner. The result always has one of the four shapes, at 720p, 1080p or 4K.

Common crops and their settings

A landscape video filling a vertical frame keeps only about a third of its width, so check that the subject stays inside from start to end. If it wanders, split the clip with S and slide each piece on its own.

Zoom and sharpness

Cropping throws pixels away, and zooming spreads the ones left over a bigger area. A 1080p clip zoomed to 200% shows a quarter of its picture, about 960 × 540 pixels' worth, stretched across a 1080p frame, so it looks softer. Two ways to keep crops crisp:

• Film bigger than you export. A 4K clip zoomed to 200% inside a 1080p video loses no detail at all.
• Export at the size the crop really has. A tight crop of a 1080p clip gains nothing from a 4K export; 1080p or 720p is honest, and smaller.

Zoom below 100% works the other way round: the picture shrinks and a border appears around it, in the Background color you choose with nothing selected. That suits a clip framed like a picture on a colored page.

Cropping more than one clip

Each clip keeps its own framing, which helps when clips were filmed differently: one can fill the frame while the next keeps its bars. It also means a crop is set clip by clip; there is no setting that changes them all at once.

If one long video should be cropped the same way throughout, set the framing before you cut it up. Pieces split from a clip keep its zoom and position, so you frame once and every piece follows.

The framing does not move over time, so a crop cannot follow someone walking across the room on its own. Split the clip where they move and slide each piece to keep them in view. For turning a clip rather than cutting into it, see rotate a video, and for fitting one video to several platforms, the video resizer.