How to turn a landscape video into a vertical or square one

Crop to fill, or fit with bars

There are two ways to put a wide video into a tall frame, and each gives up something different.

• Fill (crop) — the video is enlarged until it covers the whole frame and the parts that stick out are cut off. From 16:9 to 9:16, only a strip about a third of the original width survives. The result fills the screen, but anything near the left and right edges is gone.
• Fit (bars) — the whole picture is kept and shrunk to fit the frame's width, with bars above and below. Nothing is lost, but a 16:9 video then fills only about a third of a 9:16 screen's height, so it looks small on a phone.

Fill suits footage with one subject near the middle: a person talking, a product, a single action. Fit suits footage where the whole width matters — a wide landscape, a group, a screen recording with text across it. Square (1:1) is a gentler compromise: filling a square from a 16:9 video keeps a little over half the width.

Pick the shape for where it's going

Reframing with Resize Video

1. Open Resize Video and add your video — MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, up to 10 at a time and 4 GB each.
2. Choose the Aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 16:9.
3. Choose the Fit: Fill frame (crop edges) or Fit inside (black bars).
4. Choose the Output height: 1920, 1080 or 720 px.
5. Click Resize and download the MP4.

With Fill, the centre of the picture is kept: a landscape video loses equal strips from the left and right. With Fit, the bars are black. The video is always re-encoded at the new size into an MP4; at 1080 and 1920 heights the result stays sharp on phones. For square posts there's a ready-made square crop page set to 1:1 at 1080 px.

Resize Video needs a browser with WebCodecs. Recent Chrome, Edge and Safari 17+ work best; Firefox supports most tools and tells you if a codec isn't available.

When the subject isn't in the centre

A centre crop is a guess, and it's wrong whenever the subject stands to one side. Crop Video lets you choose the area yourself: drag and resize a box over a frame of the video, and the whole clip is cropped to it. Presets cover 1:1, 4:5, 3:2 and 16:9; for a vertical result, use Free and draw a tall box around the subject. The kept area is re-encoded at its original sharpness, with no enlarging.

Then run the cropped clip through Resize Video at 9:16 with Fill. If your box was close to the vertical shape, very little more is cut, and you get the exact frame size the apps expect. Each pass re-encodes the video once, so start from the best-quality original you have.

Tip: The crop box stays in the same place for the whole clip — it doesn't follow a moving subject. If the subject walks across the frame, trim the video into shorter pieces and crop each one separately.

Keep important things out of the edges

Vertical video apps draw their own interface on top of your video: captions, the account name, buttons for likes, comments and sharing, and progress bars. These mostly sit along the bottom and the right-hand side, and a little at the top. Faces, text and anything a viewer must read belong in the middle of the frame, away from those edges. The exact areas vary between apps and change over time, so check each app's current guidance and preview a post before publishing.

Text you add yourself — captions burned in with Burn In Subtitles, for example — can be placed at the top or bottom; leave enough room so it isn't hidden behind the app's own caption.

Video sideways? Rotate it instead

Sometimes a video looks horizontal only because it's lying on its side: it was filmed upright but plays rotated. That isn't a framing problem, and cropping would throw away most of the picture. Rotate Video turns it 90° either way or 180°, and can mirror it. Where the format allows, the turn is saved as orientation information and the video itself is copied untouched, so it's quick and lossless. If an app still shows it sideways, turn on Re-encode the frames under Advanced and rotate again.