Square Video Crop

A small macOS app for cropping and trimming video into a square clip centered for a circular "video orb" ornament — a round display that only shows the middle of a square frame.

Because the orb is circular, the part of your video that actually shows is the inscribed circle of the square crop. Square Video Crop gives you a live preview with a safety circle so you can frame your subject inside what the orb will display, trim the clip down, and export a ready-to-use .mp4.

Features

• Drag-and-drop a .mp4 / .mov, or pick one with a file dialog
• Live square crop overlay with draggable corner handles and body drag
  • The crop stays square in actual video pixels, not just on-screen
  • A safety circle (80% of the square) shows what the round orb display will actually show
• Timeline trimmer with a thumbnail strip, draggable in/out handles, and a scrubable red playhead
• Transport controls — play/pause, skip to trim start/end, and loop
• Correct orientation handling for both portrait and landscape source video
• High-quality export to square .mp4, cropped and trimmed to your selection

Requirements

• macOS 13+ (uses the modern async AVFoundation APIs; macOS 15+ takes the newest export path)
• Xcode 15 or later to build

Building

git clone https://github.com/Kunkles/SquareVideoCrop.git
cd SquareVideoCrop
open SquareVideoCrop/SquareVideoCrop.xcodeproj

Then build and run the SquareVideoCrop scheme in Xcode (⌘R).

Usage

1. Launch the app and drop a video onto the window (or click Choose File…).
2. Drag the corner handles on the video to set your square crop. Keep your subject inside the circle — that's all the orb will show.
3. Drag the white handles on the timeline to set trim in/out points, and drag the red playhead to scrub.
4. Click Export and choose where to save the square .mp4.

How it works

• VideoGeometry computes the upright pixel size from the track's naturalSize and preferredTransform, so the preview and export share one coordinate system.
• CropOverlay keeps the crop square in video-pixel space and renders the safety circle.
• The export pipeline in ContentView builds an AVMutableVideoComposition, translating the crop into the source's coordinate space (bottom-left origin for portrait, top-left for landscape) and rendering exactly the square crop with no scaling.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for version history and notable changes.

License

No license specified yet — all rights reserved by default. Add a LICENSE file if you want to allow reuse.