Estimated Time to Fix: 10 minutes

Summary

You recorded a great video horizontally for YouTube, but now your marketing team wants you to post it on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Instead of re-recording it, you can use Microsoft Clipchamp to instantly crop and resize the video into the tall, vertical format social media algorithms prefer.

Before You Start

• A video file imported into a Microsoft Clipchamp project.

Instructions

1. Understand Aspect Ratios

An "aspect ratio" is the shape of the video rectangle.

• 16:9 (Widescreen): Standard YouTube, TV, and monitor size. Horizontal.
• 9:16 (Portrait): Standard TikTok, Instagram Reel, and YouTube Shorts size. Vertical.
• 1:1 (Square): Older Instagram posts and LinkedIn feeds.

2. Change the Project Ratio

You need to change the canvas your video sits on.

1. Open your video project in Clipchamp.
2. Look at the video preview player in the top center of the screen.
3. In the top right corner of that player, you will see a button that says 16:9. Click it.
4. A dropdown menu will appear. Select 9:16 (or whichever ratio your social platform requires).
5. The preview window will instantly change from a wide rectangle to a tall, vertical rectangle.

3. Fix the Black Bars

Because you put a wide video into a tall box, you will now have massive black bars at the top and bottom of your video. You have two choices to fix this:

Option A: Fill the screen (The standard social media method) This zooms the video in until it fills the whole vertical space, cutting off the left and right edges.

1. Click the video clip on the timeline so it is highlighted in green.
2. Look for the floating toolbar that appears next to the video preview.
3. Click the Fill icon (it looks like a square expanding).
4. The video will zoom in. You can click and drag the video left or right inside the preview window to make sure the main subject stays in the center.

Option B: Keep the black bars and add a background blur If you absolutely cannot cut off the sides of the video, you can fill the black bars with a blurred version of the video.

1. Click the video on the timeline.
2. Do not click Fill. Instead, click the Effects tab on the far right property panel.
3. Scroll down and click the Background Blur effect. This replaces the black bars with a soft, blurred copy of the video.

4. Export for Social Media

1. Click the purple Export button in the top right corner.
2. Select 1080p.
3. Once it finishes rendering, click Save to your computer.
4. You can now transfer this file to your phone or upload it directly to TikTok/Instagram from your web browser.

Troubleshooting

WARNING

If your video features multiple people standing far apart, zooming it to 9:16 will usually cut one of them completely out of the frame. Vertical video is best suited for a single subject standing in the center.

Symptom / Error	Potential Cause	Solution
The text/titles got cut off when I resized	Titles don't automatically scale	Click the title clip on your timeline, and use the corners of the text box in the preview player to shrink it so it fits inside the new vertical borders.

Related Articles

• How to Edit Videos for Free Using Microsoft Clipchamp

Did this solve your problem?