A well-edited video can increase your view count many times over. Knowing how to at least crop a video to meet the platform’s video dimension requirements is one of the most basic things you can do for your audience. Even if you’re only going to show your video to your friends and family, removing unnecessary bits in the frame with a simple crop is more than just an aesthetic choice – it shows your professionalism.

Fortunately, Windows offers a few basic video editing tools that can get the job done for free. If you need more than a basic setup, there are also a number of third-party applications, both free and paid. In this article, we’ll cover all of these methods and clarify a few things about video cropping in general.

Cropping and trimming are two terms that are often misunderstood by beginners. But there is a big difference between the two.

Cropping is a technique that removes parts of a video within the frame. Nowadays, most cropping tools can do much more than that, such as changing the orientation (landscape or portrait) and the framing (aspect ratio). But cropping only means removing parts of the video that you don't want.