How to Crop Videos

By  on  

During a recent episode of the Script and Style podcast, I had noticed that the video recording had showed a bit of our internal chat that wasn't necessary for our viewers to see. While there's nothing wrong with giving viewers a peek into the show preparation, presenting the best possible video is our priority. So how can we crop a video via command line?

The amazing ffmpeg utility allows engineers to crop videos with one easy to use filter:

# Crop an image to 500x500 starting at 0x0
ffmpeg -i sns-episode.webm -filter:v "crop=500:500:0:0" sns-episode-cropped.mp4

The crop filter format is easy to follow: {desired_width}:{desired_height}:{start_x}:{start_y}.

I've written dozens of posts about ffmpeg and how it has the power to manipulate videos in amazing ways. Now you know how to crop videos quickly from command line!

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Text Overlap

    One of the important functions of CSS is to position elements. Margin, padding, top, left, right, bottom, position, and z-index are just a few of the major players in CSS positioning. By using the above spacing...

  • By
    Create a Simple News Scroller Using Dojo

    My journey into Dojo JavaScript has been exciting and I'm continuing to learn more as I port MooTools scripts to Dojo. My latest experiment is porting a simple new scroller from MooTools to Dojo. The code is very similar! The HTML The news items...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!