Cropping Your Video in the Editor

What the crop tool does

The crop tool lets you select a rectangular region of your recording and discard everything outside it. The final exported video only contains the cropped region — at full quality, with all your other edits (zooms, annotations, camera overlay, subtitles) applied on top.

Common uses:

  • Ultrawide recordings — trim a 5120×1440 recording down to a clean 16:9 frame for YouTube or other platforms.
  • Menu bars and docks — crop them out if you don't want them visible in the final video.
  • Focused content — zoom in on a specific window or area you were demonstrating instead of showing the whole display.
  • Removing letterboxing — if your source has black bars, crop them away.

How to crop

  1. Open your recording in the editor.
  2. In the video controls bar (above the timeline), click the Crop button next to the aspect ratio menu.
  3. A resizable rectangle appears over the video preview. The area outside it is dimmed so you can see exactly what will be kept.
  4. Adjust the crop:
    • Drag the rectangle to move it around.
    • Drag any corner to resize freely.
    • Drag any edge to resize in one direction.
    • Use the aspect ratio buttons at the bottom (Free, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 9:16) to snap to a preset.
  5. The pixel dimensions of your crop are shown above the rectangle in real time (e.g. 1920 × 1080 • 80% × 60%).
  6. Click Apply (or press Return) to save the crop to your project.

Changing or removing a crop

Once applied, the Crop button in the controls bar shows as "Cropped" in blue so you know it's active.

  • Click the Crop button again to re-enter edit mode and adjust the rectangle.
  • In edit mode, click Clear to remove the crop entirely — your full frame comes back.
  • Click Cancel to exit without saving changes.

Where the crop shows up

When you apply a crop, it's reflected in every output:

  • Editor preview — the preview immediately shrinks to the cropped region.
  • Export — the exported video is sized to the crop, not the original. A crop that covers 50% × 50% of a 4K recording produces a 1920×1080 output file.
  • Frame grab — saved snapshots use the cropped region at full resolution.
  • Camera-only export — not affected (the camera track is separate).

Tips

  • The rule-of-thirds grid inside the crop rectangle helps compose a visually balanced frame.
  • Aspect ratio presets center the crop in the source by default — you can move it afterward.
  • You can't crop beyond the frame edges (minimum crop size is 5% of the source).
  • If you change the aspect ratio of the project (via the dropdown next to Crop), the crop stays as-is — combine the two to fit any target format.
  • Undo and redo work with crop changes, so feel free to experiment.

Performance

Cropping is a GPU-accelerated operation in our Metal-based rendering pipeline. It doesn't slow down preview playback or export significantly — the cropped region is sampled directly, without copying the full frame to memory.