How to make a video vertical for TikTok, Reels and Shorts

Guides · Updated 13 October 2026 · By Tiago Santos

TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are watched on a phone held upright, so they show vertical video best: 9:16, taller than it is wide. A landscape clip from a camera, a screen recording or a phone held sideways shows up there as a thin strip with big empty bands. Cropping it to 9:16 fills the screen.

Which shape each app wants

• TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Stories: vertical 9:16 (1080 × 1920 is the usual size).
• Instagram feed posts: portrait 4:5 takes the most space in the feed; square 1:1 also works.
• YouTube, websites, TVs: widescreen 16:9, which is what most cameras record already.

Crop or add bars?

There are two ways to turn a wide video into a tall one. Cropping keeps a vertical slice and cuts off the sides: the video fills the phone screen, but anything at the edges is gone. Adding bars keeps the whole picture small in the middle with empty or blurred bands above and below. For a person talking, a pet or anything happening in one spot, cropping looks far better. For a wide landscape or a group spread across the frame, bars keep everyone in.

Crop a video to 9:16, without uploading it

1. Open Crop video and choose your MP4 or MOV.
2. “Vertical 9:16” is already picked. Drag the box over the part that matters, usually the face of whoever is talking. For an Instagram post, pick 4:5 or square instead.
3. Crop it, play the result on the page to check, and post the saved MP4.

The video is cropped in your browser with your device’s own video encoder, so it never sits on anyone’s server first. The sound is kept unless you tick “Remove the sound”.

Keep the important part away from the edges

On TikTok and Reels the caption, the buttons and the account name sit on top of the bottom and right of the video. Keep faces and on-screen text in the upper middle of the box, not in the bottom fifth.

What about sharpness?

A vertical slice of a landscape video has fewer pixels than the whole frame. From 1080p it comes out about 606 × 1080, from 4K about 1214 × 2160. On a phone screen 1080p sources still look clean, and the apps accept any size in the right shape. Crop video never stretches the picture to make it look bigger, since that only adds blur.

Other fixes you might need first

• Recorded with the phone sideways? Rotate video turns it the right way up in a second, with no quality lost.
• Too long? Trim video keeps just the part you want.
• Too big to send? Compress video makes it smaller.