Horizontal Video to Vertical: Tricks You Should Know

Repurposing 16:9 footage for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok is one of the most common workflow challenges content creators face. Done badly it looks lazy. Done well, it looks like it was always meant to be vertical. Here's how to do it right in Final Cut Pro.

Set up a vertical sequence

The first step is a dedicated vertical project. In FCP, go to File → New → Project and in the Video Properties, set the resolution to 1080 × 1920 (or 4K equivalent: 2160 × 3840). This creates a true 9:16 project rather than cropping from within a 16:9 timeline, which gives you more control and better export quality.

Import your horizontal clips into this vertical project. They'll appear as horizontal bars in the vertical frame. That's expected. Now you need to decide how to fill the frame.

The simple approach: scale and reframe

Select a clip and open the Transform controls in the Video Inspector. Scale the clip up until it fills the vertical frame height. For 1080p source footage in a 1080×1920 project, you'll need approximately 178% scale to fill the width. Then use the position controls to reframe the shot so your subject is centred vertically in the frame.

The downside: you're using only the centre portion of your horizontal frame, and you lose a lot of the original composition. For wide landscape shots this looks terrible. For talking-head footage where the subject is already centred, it works fine.

The pro approach: two-layer composite

This is the technique that makes vertical repurposing look genuinely designed rather than lazily cropped. Use two layers of the same clip: the bottom layer is scaled up and blurred heavily (using the Gaussian Blur effect) to fill the vertical frame as a background. The top layer is the original clip scaled to fit within the frame (letterboxed in the vertical space) so the full horizontal image is visible.

The blurred background fills the black bars at the top and bottom of the frame with a contextual visual that matches the clip. The result looks intentional and works well for any type of footage, including wide shots where simple reframing would destroy the composition.

Text and graphics in vertical space

Vertical video has natural zones: the top third and bottom third are where captions, text overlays, and call-to-action graphics live on platforms. Plan your vertical layout with these zones in mind: keep your subject in the middle third of the frame and use the top and bottom for text elements. FCP's title tools work in your vertical sequence exactly as they would in a horizontal one; just reposition them to fit the 9:16 layout.