iMovie has a video editing interface with three panes, source content at the top left, preview top right, and timeline on the screen's bottom part. For example, if you have footage from an old standard camera and want to merge video with HD video, in this case, you have to crop video clips, so they can fit. In iMovie, you crop photos, freeze frames, video clips to get a close-up or increase the focus on a subject of interest or eliminate unwanted or distracting areas from the video clip.Ĭropping is also helpful if you have video clips that don't fit your movie's aspect ratio. Keep reading the below content, then you'll get the steps about cropping videos on iMovie on Mac/iPhone/iPad.

It is one of the best tools for entry-level video editing as its interface is self-explanatory. iMovie is an excellent tool available on iOS devices for creating and editing movies, media organization, color grading, and soundtrack in the video. If iMovie does things using method 2, then recording in 5K would really help keep the resolution higher on those cropped/panned/zoomed scenes.If you are looking for the answers to the below questions, this iMovie crop video article will explain in detail how to do it. But I also do a lot of ken burns effects to simulate pan & zooming. I often crop scenes so the 'action' is more front-and-center. My projects are all 4K these days so for me, it would be importing 5k video. So if you crop a 4k video down in half, then export, it's still going to be 1080p all the way through. The whole raw original file is imported into the project and only once you export out the final product, is any video resolution changing happen.

Method 2) When you import 4K video into a 1080p project, nothing is converted. I would refer to this as the shit method. So when you render the final product, you could have video that is 720p or lower, depending on how much you cropped. THEN any editing you do, including cropping, are done on the 1080p imported content.

Method 1) When you import let's say 4K video into a 1080p project, iMovie could convert that 4K video into 1080p. The way I figure, there are two different ways it could work and given how much iMovie for Mac is one of many red-headed stepchildren of Apple, I wouldn't be surprised if they do it the shit way. That way the cropped result will be a higher resolution and the cropped clip should be sharper.īut they may not work, it depends on how imovie cropping works. One way to combat this would be to shoot in 5K on a gopro. So for example if I have a 4K project and I crop one clip down, that section of the video is going to be a lower resolution, then stretched to fill the 4K frame. When you crop video, you are lowering the resolution of the video.

How to crop the video in imovie