Guide · OtterStudio

Turn a landscape video into a Reel, TikTok or Short

Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and every story format all want the same thing: a video that is 1080 pixels wide and 1920 tall. Your camera shot it the other way round. OtterStudio changes the shape of the frame, keeps your footage filling it, and exports the file the apps expect.

Open OtterStudio →

Change the shape of the frame

The Composition card at the top right shows the frame's size. Until you touch it, the first video you add decides it, which is why a phone clip comes in portrait and a camera clip comes in landscape. Press Tall and the frame becomes 1080×1920. The preview turns upright and the footage is cropped to fill it, left and right cut off, the middle kept.

The other buttons are the shapes people actually export to: Wide is 1920×1080 for YouTube, Square is 1080×1080 for feeds, Portrait is 1080×1350, the tall Instagram feed size, and 4K and 720p are the larger and smaller landscape sizes. Type into the width and height fields for anything else; the button between them swaps the two.

There is one vertical preset because Reels, TikTok, Shorts and Stories all take the same numbers. You do not need a different export for each.

Decide what is cropped

Filling a tall frame with wide footage means losing the sides. If the subject is in the middle, that is fine. If it is not, click the clip on the picture and drag it left or right: the frame stays where it is and the footage moves behind it, so you choose which part shows. Under Size in the clip card, Filled is the state it is in; leave it there.

If you would rather keep the whole picture, choose Contain under Fit. The footage shrinks to fit the width and sits in the middle of the tall frame with dark bands above and below. That is the space people put a title in, or a second clip.

Stack two clips

A common vertical layout is the footage in the top half and something else in the bottom: a screen recording over a webcam, gameplay over a face, a product over a caption. Add the second file; it lands on a video lane of its own. Select each clip in turn, choose Free under Size, and set the height to half the frame, 960 pixels, then drag one to the top and one to the bottom. Cover keeps each one filling its half.

Add a caption or a logo

Press Add text for a title or a caption and drag it to where the app's own interface will not cover it, which on most of them means the middle of the frame rather than the bottom edge. There is a separate guide on text. For a logo, drop a PNG onto the page; a transparent one keeps its transparency. It arrives as a five-second clip on a video lane, and you can pull its end out to the length of the video and put it in a corner with the Position buttons.

Export

Press Export MP4. The dialog offers the frame's own size, 1080×1920, and the standard sizes below it; keep the original. H.264 at Standard quality is what the apps want, and they re-encode whatever you give them anyway, so High only makes a bigger upload. The file that downloads is a normal MP4 you can send to your phone with OtterDrop and post from there.

Going the other way

The same card takes a portrait phone clip to landscape: press Wide and the clip fills the frame with its top and bottom cropped, or choose Contain to keep the whole picture with bands at the sides. Match footage in the card puts the frame back to the first video's own size if you change your mind.