How to Crop Your Videos on the iPhone
Wide Screen Wonder
Photos are, at their best, an expression of how we see things. What we choose to show and what we don't. Like a picture frame, the cropping of a photo can make all the difference in what draws attention and how an image peaks our interest.
With movies, there's another aspect (pun intended) that anyone who's grown up with movies will understand. Cinema loves the look of an image that's wide and short. It reminds us of going to the theatre and buttered popcorn. Something that is really appealing right now. At the same time, a more squat, squareish framing seems kind of dated and retro. So the way a movie is framed offers a kind of time stamp that is layered on top of the movie itself.
Apple Photos has had unrestricted cropping on photos for years, but now, with iOS 14 on the iPhone you can crop your video as well, making it look as blockbuster or indie as you like.
To do that, choose your video on the iPhone at full screen size and choose "Edit" on the upper right corner of the screen. Then find the Crop/Rotate icon to enter Crop mode. Now you could just use the crop handles to change the image crop but you wouldn't likely end up with one of the standard aspect ratios that work best for posting on social media.
For that, we want to tap the little broken square icon that shows the standard aspect ratios used with video and social media. Here are some of the ways that works.
Vertical video is no longer the unwelcome intruder it used to be, particularly when made for mobile viewing. Choosing the Video mode on your iPhone Camera creates a 16:9 aspect image (the standard aspect ratio for HDTV) whether you use landscape or portait orientation. The thing is that it's not the natural way people look at the world so the tall and skinny format can feel a little cramped for scenes that aren't a natural fit like people's portraits, the Eiffel Tower and giraffes.
With the new video cropping tools, though, you can find a better aspect ratio that compliments the scene and plays well online.
The HDTV 16:9 format (below) feels more spacious and cinematic.
One thing to be aware of is that the newer iPhones can take a QuickTake video while in Camera mode if you just press and hold the shutter button. This is really handy for those pop-up moments that used to get away while you were fumbling with the settings. It does, though, use the Photo mode aspect ratio (4:3 by default) to take that video clip (see above). It's not an issue anymore since we can easily apply a different aspect ratio afterwards, and if you are sending that first steps video off to adoring grandparents, they could care less about the aspect ratio anyway, but it is worth knowing about for social posts.
And what if you want to change a landscape video to a portrait ratio for mobile. Used to be you had to go into Final Cut Pro or other pro software to fix that, but the cropping tool will let you do that now too.
I am not a big fan of doing lots of color and composition edits after the fact, but video is more problematic than photos because video presentation online and on screen has many different formats and orientation to accommodate. Being able to apply all the photo editing tools to our videos is a huge step forward for both the challenges of sharing and the creative process.