How to Crop Black Bars Out of a Video

Here’s how to crop black bars out of a video without distortion: add the clip, draw a crop frame around the picture, and export it at the new aspect ratio. In Movavi Video Editor, you drag that frame in a few clicks, and the bars stay out of your export.

Movavi Video Editor is an intuitive video editor with customizable video templates, one-click AI tools, and hundreds of drag-and-drop effects. For this job you need only its crop tool.

This guide fits you if you post travel vlogs and your oldest footage came off a 4:3 camera. It also fits you if you cut brand clips for Instagram or Facebook and a horizontal master has to fill a vertical screen. Both problems have one cause: the clip’s shape does not match the frame it plays in.

An aspect ratio is an image’s width compared with its height, written as width:height. When a clip is narrower than the screen, you get bars at the sides (pillarboxing). When it is wider, you get bars above and below (letterboxing). The bars get in the way during full-screen viewing and on YouTube or TikTok. Call them bars or borders, the fix is the same: you crop black borders out of the frame. Cropping changes the aspect ratio and removes the bars, so the picture can use the whole screen.

Movavi Video Editor, a desktop app for Windows and macOS, plus the video you want to fix. Pick the edition that fits your budget. Movavi Video Editor Free lets you try the crop tool, and its exports carry a 60-second cap, no 4K, and a watermark. Movavi Video Editor Lite keeps the core editing tools and auto crop behind a small watermark. The full version has every feature, with no watermark or export limits.

More than 70 million people use Movavi software. New tools land often, with 25+ updates a year. For ideas on what to make next, Movavi Ideas is a free tutorial hub with new editing ideas every week and a step-by-step tutorial for each one.

Cropping cuts away the outer edges of the frame. Stretching scales the picture unevenly to fill the screen, so people end up looking short and wide.

To crop videos without distortion, keep the crop frame in the same proportions as the project. Movavi Video Editor does this by default. The trade-off is that everything outside the frame is cut. Drag the frame onto faces and the main subject first.

Pick the ratio for your platform, then crop to it. 16:9 is the standard for high-definition video and 9:16 is the vertical format made for portrait viewing on phones.

Say you make brand clips for Instagram or Facebook and the master is horizontal. Manual mode suits old clips with fixed bars. Auto mode suits a moving subject, so in the Crop tool, choose Auto instead. Auto-tracked cropping follows the speaker or product and keeps them centered while it converts horizontal footage to vertical. One click replaces moving a frame by hand, clip after clip.

Before you export, scan the preview: faces, the product, and on-screen text should sit inside the frame. If you add auto subtitles, you can set their position on screen, which keeps them clear of the edges.

Once the frame is right, style the clip. Movavi Video Editor comes with hundreds of drag-and-drop effects: titles, transitions, filters, and overlays, plus copyright-free music. Drop a retro look on the travel vlog or a bold title on the brand clip. For more themes, the Movavi Effects subscription adds 10,000+ effects and 1,500+ music tracks, and you can preview any of them on your own video for free.

Here’s how to crop a video on other devices.

• iPhone (Photos app): open the video, tap Edit, tap Crop, drag the frame, and tap Done.
• Android: in Google Photos, open the video, tap Edit, then tap Crop.
• Windows 10 and 11: Windows 10 has no built-in video crop tool, so you need an app such as VLC. Windows 11 includes Clipchamp, which crops video.
• Mac: in iMovie, select the clip, click the crop tool, adjust the frame, and apply it.
• VLC: open the Video Effects tab, then the Crop tab, and enter pixel values. VLC gives no visual preview of the crop.

• Stretching the clip to fill the frame. People look short and wide. Crop instead.
• Cutting off the subject. The crop frame removes everything outside it, so place it on faces and the product before you apply it.
• Exporting at a mismatched aspect ratio. Movavi Video Editor lets you adjust resolution and aspect ratio on export; set both to the cropped shape.
• Mixing up crop and trim. Trimming shortens a clip from the start or end. Cropping changes what the frame shows.

Open an old 4:3 clip or a horizontal brand video in Movavi Video Editor, crop it to fit, and see how much more screen your picture gets. After that, browse Movavi Ideas for what to make next.