Crop screen recordings

Cropping your screen recordings helps you focus your viewer’s attention by removing unnecessary parts of the screen — like browser toolbars, menu bars, or extra UI elements.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to crop a screen recording inside Tella’s video editor, whether you’re working with a single clip or multiple clips with different layouts.

🧠 What Does Cropping Do?

Cropping lets you visually trim your screen recording by selecting the part you want to keep — everything outside of that is hidden from view.

Example:

Say your screen recording includes your full desktop — menu bar, browser, and slide content.

With cropping, you can isolate just the slide area and hide the rest.

How to crop a screen recording

1. Select the Clip You Want to Crop

   • Click on your screen recording in the timeline.

2. Open the Crop Tool

   • Click Adjust → then Crop.

   • You’ll see:

     1. A purple crop frame that you can drag and resize.

     2. Crop settings for position, size, and aspect ratio (like 16:9 or 1:1).

     3. A live preview of what your viewers will see.

3. Adjust the Crop

   • Freeform crop: Choose “Custom” from the aspect ratio dropdown to move and resize freely.

   • Constrained crop: Choose a preset aspect ratio (like 16:9) to maintain specific dimensions.

   • Manual input: Type in exact pixel values for precision.

✅ Tip: What’s inside the purple frame is what will be shown in your final video.

Apply crop to all layouts (in a clip)

If your clip uses multiple layouts, you don’t need to crop each one individually.

Before clicking Crop, check this option: ✅ “All layouts in this clip”

This applies the crop to every layout within that clip and automatically adjusts the screen recording to fit each layout cleanly.

Apply crop across multiple clips

If your video includes several clips, each with their own layouts:

1. Open the Crop tool in any clip.

2. Adjust the crop to your preferred frame.

3. Change the setting to: ✅ “All layouts in all clips”

This will apply the same crop across every layout in every clip — saving you from repeating the process.

🧩 Example: If your entire video has 4 clips and 37 layouts total, the crop will update all 37 layouts instantly.

Reset if needed

At any point, you can click Reset to remove your crop and return to the full screen recording.

Final tip

Once cropped, your screen recording will automatically resize and align itself inside each layout — no extra tweaking needed.

This makes your video look cleaner and more professional, especially when switching between layouts or clips.