The current mechanism to crop a video on Apple devices is mediocre to put it bluntly. An often overlooked annoyance, the cropping feature is not distinct enough from the "seek forward" marker. I explain this visually in the video below.
As you can see, it is hard to control video seeking from the beginning of the video, and this is an even bigger annoyance with longer videos in which you are looking to crop maybe just the first two seconds. Since the marker starts at 00:00 seconds, we often have to rewatch the video from the beginning, even though we may want to start watching from the middle.
I propose two solutions:
(1) Differentiate the seeking marker from the cropping edges and video bar.
In my animation, I made it a triangle just below the video and cropping bar. This makes it easy to skip to any part of the video. It also gives users more precise control, especially since they don't have to worry about accidentally dragging the cropping edge.
(2) Add time stamps that stay where the user stops and make sure the marker stays there too.
In this animation, the time stamps are shown slightly above the video bar. When I go back to 0:07 seconds to mark it as my desired cropping point, the triangle marker stays there even when I start to drag the cropping edge. This way, I can align my crop exactly to where I stopped.
This may seem like a trivial change, but the smallest tweaks in User Interface can cause major differences in User Experience. :)
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