Crop the frame
Trim your recording down to the part that matters — and let the export's shape follow the crop.
Sometimes you only want to show a slice of what you captured: one panel of a wide display, a phone-shaped column of a web app, a square for social. Crop trims the frame down to a region you choose, and the exported video takes on the crop’s shape — so a tall crop exports tall, a square crop exports square.
Like every edit in Playback, cropping is non-destructive. It changes what the export shows, never the footage you captured, so you can re-crop or reset at any time.
Entering crop mode
There are two ways in:
- Toolbar — press the Crop button (or ⇧⌘K). Its tooltip reads “Crop the frame — trim what the export shows.”
- Inspector — with nothing selected on the timeline, open the Crop tab and press Adjust Crop.
Either way the stage steps back to show your whole recorded frame, and a bright keep-region appears over dimmed margins. If a take is playing, entering crop mode pauses it.
Framing the crop
Drag inside the keep-region to move it, or drag any of the eight handles to resize. Rule-of-thirds guides appear inside the region while you drag, to help you line things up. The keep-region can’t go smaller than 5% of the source in any direction.
A floating confirm bar tracks the region while you work:
- The center shows the exact pixel size of the crop, like 2880 × 1620, so you can dial in a precise output size.
- Apply (or Return) commits the crop.
- Cancel (or Esc) discards your changes, leaving whatever crop was already in place — or the full frame, if there wasn’t one.
Locking an aspect ratio
In the Crop inspector tab, the Aspect row snaps the crop to a common shape and locks it, so resizing keeps that ratio:
| Preset | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Original | The source’s own shape. |
| 16:9 | Standard widescreen video. |
| 1:1 | A square, for social. |
| 9:16 | A tall, phone-shaped clip for stories and reels. |
| 4:3 | A classic, boxier frame. |
| Free | No lock — resize to any shape. |
A locked ratio shows an accent ring; while it’s on, the handles keep the crop proportional. Choose Free to unlock without changing the current region. Presets that can’t fit an unusually wide or tall source are shown dimmed.
For exact control, the tab also has Left, Top, Width, and Height fields (as percentages of the frame).
The export follows the crop
When you apply a crop, the whole canvas reflows to its shape — the floating frame, the background, and the export all take on the new aspect. Your zooms stay aimed at the same spots through the crop, so you don’t have to re-frame them.
Resetting
The Crop tab shows the current size — Full frame when nothing’s cropped, or the pixel size when it is. When a crop is active, a Reset Crop button returns the take to the full recorded frame.