How to Crop a Travel Video to Highlight Important Elements

When you travel and take videos spontaneously it is likely that not all of them will be ‘picture perfect’ in terms of composition and how they frame the important elements that you’d like to highlight. One of the ways to fix that is by cropping the videos later on so that they focus on the elements that you want them to.

While this may sound fairly technical to the uninitiated, it’s really relatively easy provided you have the right tools to do so.

Plan the Composition

First and foremost determine the element (or elements) that you want to highlight. Then, decide what composition would be best to do so. For example, you may have taken a wide shot while you were whale watching where the whales themselves only appear towards the left side of the video. In that case, cropping part of the right (and perhaps the top and bottom) so that they appear more centrally could be ideal.

Take your time and maybe fiddle about with composition a bit before deciding. It will vary from shot to shot, and depends on how you want to frame the important elements in your video.

Start Cropping!

Once you’ve decided which parts of your video you want to crop – the one key ingredient that you’ll need is a good video editor that can act as a video cropper. The Movavi Video Editor is a particularly good choice in this regard due to the fact that it has extensive features and yet is extremely user-friendly at the same time.

With it, all you need to do to crop a video is:

1 Add the video by clicking ‘Add Media Files’ and selecting the video.
2 Switch to ‘Storyboard’ mode by clicking the button above the default Timeline
3 Click the ‘Crop’ button in the Preview area and drag and resize the rectangle to define the desired frame area.
4 Save the video using a preset to optimize it for the platform that you want to use it on.

Make no mistake, there’s a lot else you can accomplish with the Movavi Video Editor and it has features that will allow you to enhance the video quality, add special effects and filters, include background music, insert titles, and much more. Go ahead and check it out – you could really transform your video into something special by using it.