When you're editing in Premiere Pro, you may want to focus on certain elements that the original director of photography or videographer didn't fully highlight, or you may want to crop out unnecessary distractions at the edges of your frame.
Whatever the reason, Adobe Premiere Pro makes it easy to crop, rotate, and resize images, so you have the perfect frame. We've compiled this handy guide to help you get the hang of how to crop and resize images in Premiere Pro.
Now, cropping is essentially cutting out any unwanted bits of the frame. However, you may just want to resize your frame instead of cropping it so you can either fill the frame better or retain the edges in case you want to make slight adjustments later
While this option is similar to "Set to Frame Size," it's slightly different because it also manipulates the pixels within your image to adapt them to your sequence settings while saving you processing time. This can result in a loss of video quality; however, if you're crunched for time or processing power, this can be a good option.
If you plan on exporting your project in 1080p, try to only crop clips that are at least 2k resolution or above. This will reduce the chances of image quality loss and result in a much more seamless final product.
If you crop too much, you'll lose resolution, and your cropped images will appear blurrier and lower-quality than the rest of your footage. You can use certain plugins to try to counteract this, but a good rule of thumb is only crop if you have the extra megapixels to spare and only as needed.
Cropping is a good way to remove black bars at the top or bottom of the video or to resize the video frame to highlight an object in the video. It's also a very basic feature provided by Adobe Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro is a very intuitive video editing program, however, it may be difficult to get started on how to crop a video in Premiere for beginners and some users run into cropping not working issues. Follow these steps to crop videos in Premiere Pro easily.
Open Adobe Premiere Pro on your computer. Click File > New to create a new project. Import the video you'd like to crop in Premiere Pro. Click File and select Import from the dropping-down list. Then select the video from your computer and click Open.
Add the video to the timeline through simple drag and drop. The video you import is listed in the Project panel. Select the video from the timeline by clicking the clip and then use the step below to add crop effect.
If you want to crop a video to the square in Premiere Pro, head to Sequence > Sequence Settings > Frame Size, and enter square measurements, such as 1920x1920, and 1080x1080, click Yes to apply the settings.
You have several different ways to crop videos for TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. in Premiere Pro, crop videos by percentage, sliders, and cropping box. We recommend you use the cropping box to crop your video - it's the easiest way to crop each side of the video(left, right, top, and bottom). Simply drag the handles of the corner to crop out unwanted video frames.
Cropping a video by percentages requires the percentage value. Set the percentage value to determine how much you want to crop from each side of the video. It's more flexible and also more complicated. Click on the dropdown arrow to get the slider and use the slider to set the area you want to crop. It's also possible to zoom in and reposition the video in Premiere Pro. The option is available under Video Effects > Motion > Position or Scale. Drag the Position or Scale values to set the zooming.
Some beginners complained about the crop not working issue in Premiere Pro. The crop option doesn't show up in the preview. Or the video isn't cropped as expected in the preview panel after applying the crop effects. Premiere Pro is a professional program but it requires some patience and time to understand the interface. If you are running into crop not working problem in Premiere Pro, try the following possible solutions.
1. Check if you've enabled the "Toggle Global FX Mute". The icon is under the Program viewer and above the Timeline. Click the "Toggle Global FX Mute" button and see if the crop option is available in the preview.
2. Double-click the clip in the timeline to open the video parameters in the Effects Controls Panel. In the Effects Controls Panel, select Opacity > Oval or Rectangle mask shape. Now, the mask should show up on the Program monitor. This way is reported to work for those for have multiple masks created.
If Premiere Pro is too dificult to get started, try a much simpler video cropper tool. For the video cropping job, we use Winxvideo AI. It crops video to any desired frame size with ease using a cropping letterbox. The program also lets you change video size(resolution, aspect ratio, video audio parameters, video file size, and more. Use the following steps to crop videos with the Premiere Pro alternative.
Step 1. Free download the tool, install and open it on your computer. Click + Video button and select the clip you'd like to crop. Choose an output format from the popping up Output Profile window. MP4 H.264 is a widely used format for playing, sharing, and uploading.
Step 2. Click the Edit button to open the video editing panel. Then, click Crop & Expand tab and check Enable Crop to enable the cropping feature. You can set the aspect ratio to 16:9, 4:3, or 1:1 and then drag the border of the letter box to crop the video easily. You can also enter desired values near the boxes of Left, Width, Top, and Height to cut out unwanted frames or highlight the object in the video. Click Done to save the cropping and close the cropping window.
You can find many useful Premiere Pro channels and tutorials on YouTube. We pick the clearest and quickest tutorial about how to crop a video in Premire Pro from YouTube. To save your time, open the following video tutorial to learn how to crop out unwanted video frames in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Kaley Torres is a self-motivated, creative editor with eight years of marketing and SEO experience, specializing in writing on DVD, video, audio, images, new digital contents etc. With a partiality DVD collection, Kaley also enjoys digitizing DVD and is keen to share her DVD video conversion solutions as well as video sharing tips on social media.
Cropping a video means cutting a region of the frame of your visual content. The section you erase will show black bars that you can fill with other elements such as an image, a background color, or different videos, then stretch the image to zoom the part of the video you decided to keep.
Many video editors use the crop effect to create a split-screen effect, add a background to videos recorded vertically on a mobile phone, focus the attention on a specific detail in the scene, create transitions, and many other creative effects.
Go to File on the upper menu and select Import File. In the pop-up window, you can search for a video clip on any folder on your computer or external storage devices connected to your computer. Once you find the folder and video you want, click open to import it.
Under Crop, there's also a Zoom checkbox. If you click on Zoom, the video clips will stretch to fill the frame, removing the black spaces left by the crop. Be aware that this stretch might affect the video quality and proportions of the image.
Make sure the cropped video is compatible with your project's output aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is the relationship between the video's width and height. The aspect ratio most commonly used on movies and YouTube is 16:9; for YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and TikTok, it is 9:16; and for Facebook or Instagram's feed, the aspect ratio used is either 1:1 or 4:5.
Start by creating a new project in Premiere Pro and import the video footage you want to crop. Go to File > New > Sequence to open the new sequence dialog box. On the sequence settings tab, set the editing mode as Custom and choose your custom resolution and aspect ratio.
If you apply the effect directly to the video you want to crop, the filter will be limited to the source video size, not the sequence size and aspect ratio. To ensure that, you need to create a black video slug.
Since you already have your black video with the sequence aspect ratio and resolution, use Layer Size as Frame Size. You can customize the Frame size by selecting Custom Size, and enable the width, height, and scale parameters to manually adjust the video dimensions.
The last setting in the transformation group is the Framing parameter where you have three options: Fit in Frame scales the image to fit the sequence size and does not stretch or crop the image but gives a letterbox look. Fill Frame adds a cropping effect. Distort to Fit stretches the image to fit the frame.
Here, you have several options to choose from. You can start with the Magic Sharp option from the Method menu. Set sharpness around the middle and adjust as necessary to refine the image detail or smooth it. Experiment with other quality settings if Magic Sharp does not work for your video clip.
With the crop tool, you can create many variations of professional intros, transitions, and scenes for your video in Premiere Pro. Play around with every control in the crop effect library and use your unique creativity to discover its full potential.
I think the question was about display aspect ratio, Ann. That's the setting I can't adjust. Width and height are locked together, so when I change one, the other changes too. I'm trying to output a very short (as in display height) but wide video file. The kind of letterbox format that would normally have black borders top and bottom, but without the black borders.
The aspect ratio is only locked in the preview section of sequence settings for me. In CC 2017, if I adjust the sequence settings and select 'Custom', I can set any size I want under the 'Video' section.
My challenge was to find a way of outputting a video that had been created in a 16:9 frame, using cropping to mask the top and bottom portions of the frame. By outputting to 16:9 I got black bars top and bottom. The client asked for these to be removed and I did this at the output stage.
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