For downloading full videos from YouTube, they let you subscribe to their premium service which provides those features. And yet, sometimes one might be looking for a means of cropping and downloading only a particular part of the video for personal usage.
I know this doesn’t happen all the time but sometimes you just want to grab a particular bit from a video, maybe even your own videos, without first downloading special software, which is also often full of malware if you’re not careful.
Try YT Cutter
On my quest for finding a tool that lets you choose a YouTube video, crop it as needed, and give you download options for a movie file or even GIF animation, I came across a site that’s called YT Cutter. It’s free to use and comes with a very user-friendly UI. Here are the steps how you can crop and download from YouTube. Any video resolution and framerate should work. I’ve tried a few, such as 1080p60 as well as others, and did not encounter issues.
1. Enter URL of the video
As a first step, you just enter the URL to the video that you want to crop and download. For this example, we’ll use our recent footage of our Red Dead Redemption 2 let’s play video. Makes sense not to send a two-hour clip to someone if we only want to use a short moment from within the whole footage. You then click the “Start” button.
2. Mark the start and end time for the crop
You play the video until you get to the moment where you’d like your crop to start. Then you just hit the “start” button below the current time. After that was captured, you play until you reach the moment you’d like to end your crop and hit the “end” button, which is right next to the other “start” button that you just used. You can also enter the times manually instead.
3. Preview and chose the download format
You can now hit “preview” to make sure you got everything you wanted and then click on “download” to open the downloading options. The option “video file” will give you an mp4 file, “GIF animation” will give you an animated GIF loop, and “audio file” will give you an mp3 file only with the sound of the video. Done. Your file will download now.
Legal issues?
This tool is only meant to crop and download legitimate footage. I use it for material that I own and to make short crops or turn them into GIFs for social media right in the browser without any downloaded software. You could also use this to crop and download videos under creative commons license, but any other content, especially the monetized material that comes with ads, might be a violation of YouTube’s terms of service or a copyright issue.
Alternatives
This is only the service which I currently liked the best but if you want, you can also check out similar services such as https://ytcropper.com/ or https://hesetube.com/. When you’re going wild in this space, looking for video downloading, cropping, or file conversion software, pay attention to where you’re going. Often such software is problematic and could come with malware. Be careful and stay safe!
Photo credit: The feature image “Workday photo” has been done by Glenn Carstens-Peters. The screenshots are part of the featured website and owned by YT Cutter and HTML5 UP web design.
