How to Crop a Video for Instagram
The fastest way to crop a video for Instagram is to reframe it yourself before sharing , using Crop in the reel clip editor or a cropper beforehand , because anything with an unsupported aspect ratio gets cropped automatically anyway. Here's how to keep that decision, plus the second crop most people forget.
Crop a video for Instagram before Instagram crops it
Instagram's Help Center states it plainly: if the aspect ratio of your media isn't supported, it will be cropped to fit a supported one. That's not a warning about edge cases. It's the default behaviour for anything shaped wrong.
The in-app reel clip editor documents Scale and Crop among its tools, so the reframing can happen inside the app. The point isn't which tool you use. It's that an automatic crop takes the middle of the frame and discards the rest, and the middle of the frame is rarely where you put the thing that matters.
The cover photo is a second crop, and it's one-way
A reel gets cropped twice: once as video, once as a still. Instagram recommends 420 x 654 pixels for the cover, a 1:1.55 ratio, which is neither the shape of your reel nor the shape of a square. And its Help Center notes the cover photo can't currently be changed after upload.
That combination is unusually unforgiving. A cover frame that looked fine full-screen can land with a face half out of shot in a shape you never previewed, and there's no going back to fix it. Worth choosing on purpose, before you tap share.
Composing inside the frame you're actually posting in
Most cropping happens because the editing frame and the posting frame were different shapes, and the mismatch only surfaced at the end.
Montaj edits vertically in 9:16 from the start, so the frame on screen while you work is the frame the file comes out in. 1080×1920, no watermark, ready for you to upload. Text, subtitles and B-roll layers all get placed against that frame rather than against a wider one you'll later have to crop down. It runs on your device, so the footage isn't uploaded anywhere while you're deciding. When you crop a video for Instagram as an afterthought, something always ends up half out of frame; composing in the target shape is how you stop paying that tax.
Cropping a video for Instagram in 4 steps
- 1
Crop deliberately, or Instagram will do it for you
Instagram's Help Center is explicit that a photo or video whose aspect ratio isn't supported gets cropped to fit one that is. Cropping yourself is the only way to control which part survives.
- 2
Use Crop in the reel clip editor
Instagram's documented clip-editing tools include Scale and Crop, so you can reframe a clip inside the app before sharing it.
- 3
Keep the subject off the edges
Whatever sits at the very top or bottom of the frame is the first thing lost to an automatic crop on a surface you didn't plan for.
- 4
Choose the cover photo as a separate crop
Instagram recommends 420 x 654 pixels, a 1:1.55 ratio, for a reel cover, and its Help Center notes the cover can't currently be changed after upload. Pick the frame before you share, not after.
The verdict
— Chloé, Senior Video Editor