crop video to vertical

Cropping to vertical means selecting a tall, narrow region out of your horizontal frame rather than trying to fit the whole frame into a vertical shape. For a 1920x1080 source cropped to a standard 1080x1920 vertical output, you'd actually need a source with enough vertical resolution to crop that tall — a 1920x1080 (1080p) horizontal video is only 1080 pixels tall to begin with, so cropping a full 1920-pixel-tall region from it isn't possible. In practice, you crop to a narrower width while keeping the source's existing height, producing a vertical result at a smaller resolution than 1080x1920, which is usually fine since most viewing happens on a phone screen anyway.

For a 1920x1080 source, a true 9:16-shaped crop at the full source height works out to about 608 pixels wide (1080 × 9 ÷ 16 ≈ 608), so a centered vertical crop would be roughly X=656, Y=0, Width=608, Height=1080 — a narrow vertical strip taken from the horizontal center of the frame. Adjust the X offset to shift which part of the horizontal frame stays in view; the crop always keeps the full original height in this scenario, using only what your source video actually has.

The critical decision is what to keep in frame. Unlike resizing, which preserves everything (just smaller, with bars), cropping permanently removes whatever falls outside your selected width. If your video has important content on both the left and right sides of the frame, no single vertical crop position captures all of it — you'd need to either accept losing some content, or use Resize Video instead if preserving the full frame matters more than avoiding bars.

This trade-off is exactly why the site offers both tools rather than just one: Resize Video for when you need the entire frame preserved regardless of bars, and Crop Video for when you want a genuine edge-to-edge vertical fill and can accept losing whatever's outside your chosen crop region.