DaVinci Resolve · Framing, motion and effects
How to crop a video in DaVinci Resolve
The short answer
Select the clip on the Edit page, open the Inspector and set Crop Left, Right, Top and Bottom under Cropping. Then raise Zoom under Transform if you want the cropped picture to fill the frame instead of showing black edges.
5 steps
In DaVinci Resolve
01
Open the Inspector
On the Edit page, select the clip in the timeline and click Inspector at the top right.
02
Set the crop
Under Cropping, drag Crop Left, Crop Right, Crop Top and Crop Bottom. Softness feathers the cropped edge.
03
Or crop in the viewer
Choose Crop from the transform menu at the bottom left of the timeline viewer and drag the edges of the box on the picture.
04
Fill the frame
Raise Zoom under Transform until the black edges disappear, and use Position to frame the subject.
05
Copy it to other clips
Copy the clip (Cmd+C on Mac, Ctrl+C on Windows), select the others and choose Edit > Paste Attributes (Option+V or Alt+V), then tick Cropping.
Good to know
Before you start
- Note 1
- Cropping removes picture but keeps the frame size, so a crop alone leaves black bars. To change the shape of the whole video, change the timeline resolution instead.
Eddie AI
Do it in Eddie
Eddie crops each shot to keep the subject in frame, and the crop carries into Resolve.
Ask "Crop in tighter on the speaker" or reframe the edit for another format. Eddie crops clip by clip rather than applying one static crop, and you can drag or nudge a crop frame by hand on the timeline. Crops are free inside a prompt run, and the framing carries into your Resolve export.
Back to Resolve
Open the edit, click Export and choose Resolve. The default is a Resolve project (.drp) that opens with the timeline built; behind the arrow is a Resolve FCPXML you bring into the project you have open with File > Import > Timeline. In the desktop app, Send to DaVinci Resolve builds the timeline in the Resolve you have running, through Eddie's script (Workspace > Scripts > Eddie AI AE).
If you imported the footage through the desktop app, the timeline points at your original camera files. If you uploaded on the web or pulled from cloud storage, it points at Eddie's proxy media: relink to those in the Media Pool with Relink Selected Clips, not to the camera originals.
FAQ
Questions
- Why does my cropped clip have black bars?
- Cropping cuts picture away but doesn't scale it. Raise Zoom in the Inspector to fill the frame.
- Can I crop on the Color page instead?
- Yes. The Sizing palette on the Color page has its own crop controls, applied per node or per clip.
