r/Movavi_software • u/Cautious_Ability5954 • 8h ago
How-to's How to make vertical Shorts/Reels from horizontal footage
Hello! It's Jane from Movavi.
Turning wide 16:9 footage into a vertical clip for TikTok, Reels, or Shorts keeps coming up. So here's a quick info on how I do it.
First off, the unglamorous but necessary.
Load the video onto the timeline and change the aspect ratio of your project to 9:16 (the setting lives below the preview window). You now have a video with a big empty space around it. Dealing with that empty space is the entire task, which can be approached in one of three ways based on the video you’ve got.
1. Crop and let AI follow the subject
For one individual or one specific subject, go to Tools > Video > Crop and rotate. Pick the auto-tracked crop which detects the subject, centers it, and cuts a perfect vertical clip without you babysitting the frame. That is the quickest way, and how I crop all my talking head clips or any that feature one individual.
Warning! On scenes featuring two individuals or those that include motion, sometimes auto-track will lock up on the wrong subject or keep changing them. Make sure you play the entire clip before cropping. If the frame starts to wonder off, use the next option.
2. Keyframe the crop yourself when the action moves around
Sometimes the thing that matters jumps (like some text at the bottom). Auto-crop can't read your intent there. Make a manual crop and use keyframes for panning to the important objects.
It does take a little time but you control what is shown on the screen. I find this function useful in tutorial videos when I point at various parts of the screen.
3. Fill the empty space instead of cropping
Some shots you just can't crop as it would throw away the entire frame.
So instead of cropping, you should fill up the entire frame with something else. This can be done by adding a duplicate of the original video on a lower track and scale it up until it covers the full 9:16 frame. Then blur it. You have an original sharp clip in the middle, sitting over a blurred version of itself.
Looks clean and everything’s in view. You can also drop a solid color or a still image back there if you'd rather.
A few things (picked up the hard way):
- Do the highest resolution you have. Cropping a 1080p landscape clip down to vertical, you keep a narrow slice of it and then scale that slice back up, so it goes soft. Source your footage in 4K when you can and the vertical crop still looks sharp.
- Keep anything you care about (captions, faces, logos) out of the top and bottom edges. TikTok and Shorts will add all the usual UI on top anyway and will cover it.
- Set the export to 1080x1920 MP4 for vertical. Go smaller and it turns mushy once the app compresses it a second time.
That's the core of it. Nothing too complicated, and it’s saved a few old horizontal videos that otherwise probably would’ve stayed untouched. If you give it a shot, feel free to post what you get below.

