FFmpeg · Command Guide

How to Crop and Resize a Video With FFmpeg

Cropping cuts away part of the frame; resizing changes the overall dimensions. They're separate operations, often combined — commonly to convert landscape footage into a vertical format.

NULLFRAME · August 29, 2026 · 3 min read

Cropping cuts away part of the frame; resizing changes the overall dimensions. They're separate operations, often combined — commonly to convert landscape footage into a vertical format.

The command

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=608:1080:656:0,scale=1080:1920" -c:a copy output.mp4

What each flag does

crop=608:1080:656:0Crops a 608×1080 region starting at x=656, y=0 — effectively taking a vertical slice from the center of a 1920×1080 frame.
scale=1080:1920Resizes that cropped region up to a standard 1080×1920 vertical resolution.
-c:a copyLeaves audio untouched since none of this affects it.

Where this goes wrong

The crop filter's width and height must be even numbers for most codecs to accept them — an odd crop dimension is one of the most common causes of a cryptic encoding failure.

Cropping without resizing

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=800:600:100:50" -c:a copy output.mp4

The four numbers are width, height, x-offset, y-offset — x and y count from the top-left corner of the original frame.

After the command

Reframing a landscape clip is exactly the setup step before a template adds the zoom, captions and motion that make it work as a vertical short.

See the templates

Common questions

How do I crop to the center automatically?+
Use FFmpeg's built-in expressions: crop=608:1080:(in_w-608)/2:(in_h-1080)/2 calculates the offset for you regardless of the source resolution.
Why does my cropped video look stretched?+
That happens if you scale to different aspect-ratio dimensions than the crop — keep the crop and scale proportions consistent, or add padding instead of stretching.
Can I crop to follow a subject instead of a fixed region?+
Not with static crop values — that requires either manual keyframed crop coordinates or a separate tracking tool; FFmpeg's crop filter alone is a fixed rectangle for the whole clip.