You’ll lose more than two-thirds of the total pixel count, making the finished video much blurrier than it ought to be. Instead of utilizing the full scope of the video frame, you’re cropping to a much lower resolution. This method works, but it’s fiddly and sacrifices video quality. Then export your finished movie and remove the black bars using the crop tool in the Photos app.

Zoom every clip so it sits full height and bang in the middle of the frame. You can try this by selecting a clip and hitting the magnifier icon to enable pinch-to-zoom mode. Alternatively, choose a Free Crop option to cut.

Set the aspect ratio you want your video to fit: 4:3 or 16:9. So what’s the solution? A quick fixĪ popular workaround is to center your vertical clips and crop out the black bars on either side later. Click the Crop button and choose the Crop option. Sure, you can make vertical videos with Apple’s other editing app, Clips, but iMovie remains better suited to certain types of projects. Despite the proliferation of short portrait videos online, the app limits your projects to a 16:9 horizontal format. Step 6: Tap the Share button and tap Save Video to save the fixed video back to the photo library.Īlthough I much prefer the iMovie method due to the fact that everything is done natively on the iOS device, some of you may wish to send the video to your Mac in order to perform a fix with QuickTime.It’s 2023, and Apple STILL doesn’t let you make vertical videos in iMovie.

Step 5: Tap Done in the upper left-hand corner. Step 4: Perform a rotate gesture on the viewer to rotate the video to the correct orientation. Step 3: Tap the Share button and tap Create Movie → Create New Movie. Step 2: Tap the Videos tab and select the clip that you wish to fix. How to fix vertical videos on iOS using iMovie Watch our hands-on video tutorial to see a couple of brief examples in action. If you’d prefer to apply the fix on a Mac, you can just as easily utilize QuickTime’s rotation feature. Have you ever started shooting a video in portrait orientation on your iPhone, only to quickly rotate into landscape mode after realizing the mistake? Once you’ve begun recording a video while in portrait orientation, it stays locked that way for the duration of the video, and vice versa.įortunately, inadvertent vertical videos can be quickly fixed by taking advantage of iMovie’s rotation feature on iOS.

How to make vertical video in imovie