Turn a horizontal video vertical

What are the dimensions of a vertical video?

The social media vertical format is 9:16, which is 1080 × 1920 pixels in Full HD. A standard landscape video is 16:9 (1920 × 1080).

Going from one to the other forces a choice about what to keep: in full frame, you keep only about a third of the picture's width. More in the TikTok video format.

Method 1: is a centre crop enough?

It's the simplest method: keep a vertical strip in the middle of the frame. It works if the subject stays centred, and cuts anything happening at the sides.

It fails as soon as the person moves or two people talk from either side of the frame.

Method 2: add a blurred background?

Keep the whole landscape picture in the middle, with a blurred fill above and below. Nothing is cut, but the video only fills part of the screen.

Useful for wide shots where everything matters (a landscape, a demo, a game screen), less so for someone talking. In Clipotte, this is the “whole video + blurred background” layout.

Method 3: track the face automatically?

A smart reframing tool moves the 9:16 window to follow whoever is speaking and cuts cleanly on shot changes. It's the method that works best for interviews, podcasts and vlogs.

That's what Clipotte does on every clip in full-frame mode. Tracking only analyses the selected passages, shot by shot, so there's no camera move in the middle of a cut.

Which method should I choose?

It depends on what your video shows. In Clipotte you can switch layout clip by clip in the editor.

Can I reframe without cutting into clips?

Not with Clipotte: it has no reframe-only mode for a whole video. It first cuts your long video into short clips, then reframes each one.

It's built to turn a long video into Shorts. For an already short video you just want vertical, a regular editor like CapCut is a better fit; see CapCut vs Opus Clip.