I have Adobe Premier but its completely overkill for most of the editing I do. Can anyone recommend a free basic editor that can crop videos?

Windows Movie Maker

GoPro Cineform/Studio? I’ve never used it, but it is free…

WMM wont let you crop/zoom a video. So a bit more advanced than that. Anyone use LightWorks?

If you have Adobe then use it, crop and export is really really easy

I have cropped in Adobe, but it takes ages to process on my laptop a small 50MB file will take up to an hour to crop and then produces a 2GB file. I just thought a lightweight package would do the same thing but faster…. Like using Gimp instead of PhotoShop.

Hour to crop? Drop the clip in, cut the bits you don’t want and then delete them. takes about 15 mins to do a first crop of about an hour of footage for me. The slow bit is watching it first.

As for rendering, look at the settings for export (match to source should work) sounds like you are exporting way above the original file size.

Premiere shouldn’t take that long a small file! 😯
So many settings/reasons it could take that long.

I’ve used Avidemux before, that’s simple to use, just watch the short tutorial first and you’ll have the hang of it.