How to make a horizontal video vertical

What changes between 16:9 and 9:16

A horizontal video is 16 wide for every 9 high. A vertical one is the same shape turned on its end: 9 wide for every 16 high, exported at 1080 by 1920. The two shapes share very little area, so something has to give. Either you cut away picture, or you show all of it smaller.

Centre crop: fill the frame, lose the edges

A centre crop keeps the full height of the picture and the middle strip of its width, then enlarges that strip to fill the tall frame. From a 16:9 video it keeps a little under a third of the width (31.6%). Whatever was in the left and right thirds is gone.

It also enlarges what is left. From a 1920 by 1080 recording, the strip that survives is about 608 pixels wide, and it is stretched to 1080: nearly 1.8 times larger, so the picture looks softer. From a 4K recording (3840 by 2160) the strip is about 1215 pixels wide, more than the 1080 needed, and it stays sharp. If you know a video will be cropped, record it in 4K.

Blurred sides: keep the picture, shrink it

Blurred sides fits the whole picture across the width of the tall frame and fills the space above and below it with a blurred, enlarged copy of the same picture. Nothing is cut. The price is size: a 16:9 picture ends up 1080 by about 608 pixels in a frame 1920 high, a little under a third of the screen.

That is fine for anything the viewer has to read or follow across the whole frame, and a waste for a single face, which ends up small with a lot of blur around it.

Which one to pick

How to do it

1. Upload the horizontal video to the resize tool. When a video is wider than it is tall, the resize switch appears and is already on.
2. Choose blurred sides or centre crop.
3. Watch the free preview from start to finish. With a crop, check that nobody leans out of the frame.
4. Add captions and a title if you want them. They are placed on the vertical frame, after the resize, so nothing is cut off at the sides.
5. Export. The file is 1080 by 1920, with no watermark.

Where the captions go

With a centre crop, captions sit over the picture; the middle of the frame is the safest place for them. With blurred sides you have a choice: the middle puts them on the picture, while the top or the bottom puts them on the blurred part and leaves the picture clear. For a screen recording, where the picture is already full of text, the blurred part is the better place. More in the caption style guide.

What the editor does not do here

• Follow a face. The crop is the middle of the frame for the whole video. It does not track a speaker who moves or sits to one side.
• Let you move the crop. You cannot slide it left or right.
• Switch between speakers. A two-person shot is not cut into a close-up of whoever is talking.
• Stack two parts of the picture, such as a facecam above gameplay.

If one of those is what your video needs, use blurred sides for now, or film vertical next time. The free plan gives you 3 exports a month, videos up to 3 minutes, 1080p, no watermark. For the rest of the edit, see how to edit clips or how to edit a talking-head video.