Crop a Video for Instagram Reels

Reels are full-screen vertical: 9:16 at 1080 x 1920. Anything narrower gets letterboxed with bars, or shown inside a small window that kills the immersion the format depends on.

Watch the safe zones. Instagram lays its own interface over the top and bottom of the frame: the caption, the audio strip and the action buttons. Keep faces, headlines and captions inside roughly the middle 80% of the height, or the UI will sit on top of them.

Cropping a landscape recording to 9:16 throws away most of the width. Check that your subject is still framed after the crop, and if the recording is a screen capture, expect to crop into one region rather than shrink the whole screen down.

Cropping changes what is inside the frame by cutting the edges away. Resizing keeps the whole frame and changes how many pixels it is drawn with. Going from a landscape recording to a vertical post is a crop, and something has to leave the picture.

If your video is already 9:16 and you only need it at a different resolution, use the resize tool instead, it is free too and linked below.