How to Make a Vertical Video for Reels, TikTok and Shorts

October 27, 2026

Why vertical video matters

Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok and YouTube Shorts are all designed for a phone held upright. A tall 9:16 video fills the whole screen, while a horizontal one is shown as a small strip in the middle with black bars above and below. If you have a clip you filmed sideways, or a video from a camera, a drone or a screen recording, reshaping it to a vertical frame makes it look native on these platforms.

The catch is that a horizontal frame is wide and a vertical frame is tall. You cannot simply rotate the clip, because the people in it would end up lying on their side. You have to choose which part of the picture to keep.

Crop, resize or rotate: the difference

Crop cuts away parts of the picture to change its shape. This is what you want for a vertical version of a horizontal clip.
Resize changes how many pixels the video has, without changing what is in it. Use it to reduce the size, not to change the shape.
Rotate turns the whole picture by 90 or 180 degrees. Use it only to fix a clip that was recorded sideways. Our guide on fixing a sideways video covers that case.

Step by step

Trim first. Short clips make better vertical videos. Cut the part you need with the video trimmer so you only process what you will actually use.
Crop to 9:16. Open the social video cropper, choose 9:16 and download. The crop is taken from the center of the frame and the picture is never stretched.
If the subject is not in the middle, use the freeform video cropper instead and draw the exact box around the person or object you want to keep.
Check the result on your phone before posting: make sure faces, text and the important action are still in the frame.

What resolution to expect

This is the part that surprises people. If you crop a 1920×1080 horizontal clip to 9:16 without scaling it, you get a picture of about 608×1080 pixels, which is narrower than the 1080×1920 that vertical platforms prefer. It will play correctly, but it is not full vertical high definition, and upscaling it afterwards does not add real detail. For the sharpest results, film in vertical from the start whenever you can. If you cannot, crop from the highest-resolution original you have, for example a 4K recording, because there are more pixels to keep after the crop.

Keep the important things in the safe zone

The apps draw their own interface on top of your video: the profile name, the caption, the buttons on the right and the progress bar. Keep faces, subtitles and logos away from the very top and bottom of the frame and from the right edge, so nothing important is covered. If you add subtitles or a title, put them in the middle area. You can burn text into the video with the add text to video tool.

Keep the file size under control

Vertical videos are usually watched on mobile data, and platforms recompress what you upload anyway. A clean, moderately sized file survives better than a huge one. If your export is heavy, shrink it with the video compressor, and remember that a short clip at a sensible bitrate looks better than a long clip squeezed into a small size. Our guide on video resolution explains how size and quality relate.

Tips for filming for vertical

Hold the phone upright and keep the subject near the center.
Leave some empty space above and below the subject for the app interface.
Film at the highest resolution your phone offers and clean the lens.
Use good light; vertical clips are viewed small, so contrast and clear framing matter more than detail.

Everything described here runs in your browser, so your video is never uploaded to a server.

Frequently asked questions

Can I turn a horizontal video into a vertical one without losing anything?

No. A vertical frame is narrower, so part of the sides has to be cut away. That is why you choose what to keep: the centered crop works for most clips, and the freeform cropper lets you pick the exact area.

Does cropping reduce the quality?

Cropping keeps the original resolution of the part you keep and does not scale the picture. The video is processed again, at a quality close to the original, so any difference is hard to see.

Which ratio should I choose for Reels, TikTok and Shorts?

9:16. For a square feed post choose 1:1 and for the Instagram feed 4:5.