How To Crop A Video In Premiere Pro 2026 [Video Editing Tips]

Learning how to crop a video in Premiere Pro is very easy and anyone who’s starting out as a video editor should know how to do it.

I am going to break it down for you into 5 steps that are easy to follow.

By the way, you can crop photos in the exact same way as you crop videos.

Alright, so as you may or may not know me and my team are editing videos remotely for clients.

If you want someone else to crop the video for you, you can check out our services here.

Or you can hit me up directly and I can hook you up with a discount.

But enough with the shamless self promotion and advertising.

Let’s get back on topic.

Here is a very short video explaining how to crop a video in Premiere 2020.

And for those of you who want the step by step text tutorial, we have that below as well, with updated screen shots for Premiere Pro 2023.

Works the same in Premiere Pro 2024–2026. The Crop effect remains unchanged, but Adobe has added new timeline handles, AI reframing options, and “Auto Crop for Aspect Ratio” tools that can speed up this workflow.

Enjoy!

Part 1: How do you crop a video in Premiere Pro?

Very simple.

How can crop a video using Premiere by following the 5 steps presented below.

Step 1 – Import the file you want to crop

First and foremost import the video in Premiere Pro.

To do that go to File > Import and just pick the video file you want to crop, or hit CTRL+I on your keyboard.

Or, you can create a sequence and just drag and drop your video on the timeline inside Premiere Pro.

Premiere Pro now also supports direct import from cloud storage (Frame.io, Creative Cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive) without downloading the file locally. You can crop cloud-based footage the same way.

Step 2 – Search for the crop effect

Go to the Effects panel, and select the Video Effects > Transform > Crop.

Or simply do a search for the work “crop” and the Crop effct will pop up.

In Premiere Pro 2025+, the Effects panel search is faster and includes “quick actions,” meaning you can double-click Crop from the search bar without navigating folders.

Step 3 – Applying the crop effect to the video

Do apply the crop to your video just drag and drop the crop fx on top your clip on the timeline.

Alternatively you can double click the crop effect while the video clip is selected on the timline.

When you see the little fx square turn purple the crop effect has been applied to your video.

Don’t panic if you see no changes to the aspect of your video.

You need to start adjusting the settings of the crop effect to see the cropping being applied to the video.

The new “Effect Indicators” in Premiere Pro 2026 display mini icons directly on the clip, allowing quick access to Crop, Position, Masking, and other controls.

Step 4 – Cropping the video

Next go to the Effects Control panel.

There you should see the controls or settings, whatever you want to call them for the Crop effect.

The Crop effect in Premiere Pro allows you to start cropping a video from each side: left, right, top or bottom.

The settings of each of these 4 sides are controlled in percentages.

0% means there’s nothing cropped, while 100% means it’s cropped all the way to the other side. If that makes any sense?

Here’s the clip with cinematic bars by cropping the top and bottom.

Premiere Pro now includes AI-Reframe Overlays which can automatically suggest crop amounts for vertical, cinematic, and square formats. You can still crop manually exactly as shown in your original steps.

Step 5 – Automate the crop effect

You might notice that each of these 4 controls also has a little stopwatch next to it which allows you to automate the Crop effect.

So it can start from 0% and go to 50% over a certain period of time, for example.

You can adjust the percentages like this:

Or you can use the handles to drag each side of the video, like this:

There are really creative ways to use this, as we are about to see down below in just a bit.

In 2024–2026, Adobe added AI “Smooth Keyframe Animation” which automatically eases keyframes for cleaner motion. This feature works with Crop animations too but is optional — your original method still works fine.

Part 2: The crop stretch feature

As you might have noticed, there’s a little check box right there which says “Zoom“.

If you click on that, Premiere stretches the video so that it fills out the entire screen after you cropped a chunk out of it.

I find it useless for the most part, to be frank.

But there is one really cool way you can turn that into a really, really cool effect.

Here’s one way it looks, depeding on the settings.

The Zoom checkbox now works better with high-resolution footage (4K, 6K, 8K).

Most editors combine it with the new “Add Motion Blur” option for more stylized transitions.

Part 3: Other creative ways to actually use the crop effect

Even though the crop effect in Adobe’s Premiere might seem dull and boring, there are a few ways you can use it to make your videos look cooler than they really are. Joking! I know your videos are cool anyway.

Here are a handful of creative ways you can use the crop effect in Premiere Pro to ramp up the quality and feel of your video editing:

1. Cinematic bars (cinematic bar reveal & cut to b-roll)
2. Split screens
3. Clone people
4. Slide transition
5. Text reveal

Hopefully I will find the time to demonstrate all these in a new YouTube video.

New AI masking tools (Auto Object Mask & Auto Scene Split) make clone effects and split screens much faster now, but the Crop effect is still the simplest manual method.

Part 4: Cropping and aspect ratio

As a video editor you will learn that the crop effect comes in very handy when you want to change the aspect ratio of your videos.

Say you have a regular 16:9 video and you want to post it on Instagram or TikTok, or any other social platform that requires the video to be in a specific aspect ratio such as vertical or square formats.

9:16 and 1:1, or 4:5 are common aspect ratios use on social.

By using the crop effect you can basically take any video and turn it in any aspect ratio you want.

Here are some examples of how you can do that inside Premiere with the crop effect.

Vertical format (great for YouTube Shorts, or Instagram)

Square format

Make sure you also adjust the resolution of your sequence and export to match the resolution of the cropped video.

Premiere Pro now includes “Auto Reframe for Social (Advanced)” which uses AI to automatically track subjects when converting 16:9 → 9:16. However, manual cropping with the Crop effect still offers the most control for editors.

Conclusions

Cropping videos is very useful and can be done very easily. It’s one of the basic video editing techniques that any upcoming video editor must know.

Nevertheless it can be used in many other creative ways to spice up your edits and step up the look of your videos.

I hope this has been informative, thank you for reading.

The Crop effect remains one of the simplest and most reliable tools in Premiere Pro 2026.

The new AI features simply add more automation if you want it.