Guide
Burned-in bars at the top and bottom or left and right cost picture area – and twice as much in portrait. Here is how to get rid of them without measuring by hand.
Black bars appear when a video was put into a different format than it was shot in: a cinema format inside a 16:9 video (bars at the top and bottom), a phone video inside a landscape frame (bars on the left and right), or an export that only padded a format instead of cropping it.
The bars are then part of the picture. If you crop such a video for portrait, they end up in the crop – and the platform may add its own bars around it as well.
Any editing program lets you crop bars away by hand: measure the edges, set the crop, export. It works, but takes a separate pass for every video and every format – and a sharp eye when the bars are not completely black.
Bars gone, formats ready
Free, no credit card needed.
Yes. Each edge of the frame is checked on its own; dark grey or slightly noisy bars are detected too. You see what was detected before exporting.
Detection looks at the whole video, not just the first frame. A dark scene at the start is not mistaken for a bar.
Yes, with the “Remove bars” switch in the editor. The picture then stays as it is.
No. Only the black border is removed; the picture itself stays as it is and is the starting point for every crop.