How to Resize a Video for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts (9:16)

By the DocEpic team · Updated 10 November 2026 · 2 min read

Reels, Shorts and WhatsApp status are all vertical — 9:16, like a phone held upright. Upload a landscape video and the app either crops away the sides or shows it as a thin strip in the middle. Resizing it yourself first lets you decide how it looks. This guide explains the three ways to fit a video into 9:16 and when to use each.

Three ways to fit a video into 9:16

Blurred background shows your whole video in the middle, on a blurred, enlarged copy of itself. Nothing is cut off and there are no black bars — the look most creators use for landscape clips.

Colour bars shows the whole video on a plain colour of your choice. It is cleaner for presentations and leaves room above and below for text or captions.

Fill and crop fills the whole screen and cuts off the edges. Use it when the important part is in the middle of the frame, such as a person talking.

Resize your video

Resize Video makes videos for Reels, Shorts and Stories (9:16), square and portrait posts (1:1 and 4:5) and YouTube (16:9).

1. Open Resize Video and add your video.
2. Choose Reels, Shorts, Stories (9:16) — or 1:1, 4:5 or 16:9 for other formats.
3. Choose how to fill the empty space: Blurred background, Colour bars (and the colour) or Fill and crop.
4. Choose 1080p for the best quality, or 720p to finish faster and get a smaller file.
5. Click Resize and download the MP4. The sound is kept.

The video is processed in your browser and never uploaded. Every frame is re-encoded on your device: a one-minute 1080p video takes a few minutes on a laptop, and longer on a phone.

Choose exactly what stays in the frame

Fill and crop keeps the middle of the picture. If your subject is off to one side, use Crop Video instead: draw the box on a frame of the video, or pick the 9:16 shape and move the box to where the action is. The crop applies to the whole video.

Sideways or too large?

A phone video that plays sideways only needs Rotate Video, which turns it by 90° or 180° or mirrors it, keeping the sound as it is. And if the finished video is too big to send on WhatsApp or by email, Compress Video at 720p usually makes it several times smaller with little visible difference on a phone screen.

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