How to make a vertical 9:16 video on a Mac, without black bars

Reels, TikTok and Shorts want 9:16. Most footage is 16:9. There are three ways to fit one into the other, and the right one depends on the shot.

Three ways to go from 16:9 to 9:16

Method	What you see	Best for
Crop and pan	A tall slice of the frame, about a third of its width, moved to follow the subject	One person talking, a single subject
Blurred background	The whole frame in the middle, with a blurred, enlarged copy filling the space above and below	Wide shots, screen recordings, anything you can't crop
Fit	The whole frame with plain bars	When you'll add your own background later

Free: what the built-in apps do

iMovie on the Mac is built around widescreen projects, which is why people search for how to get rid of iMovie's black bars on vertical video. A common workaround is to edit in iMovie, then reframe the export in another app.

Final Cut Pro ($299.99) can make a vertical project: create a new project with a custom 1080×1920 format, then use Transform and Crop on each clip, or add a blurred copy underneath yourself.

With Stillreel

Import your clips and open the Format tab.
Choose 9:16 (1080×1920). 1:1 and 16:9 are there too.
Under Framing pick Crop & pan, Blurred background or Fit (bars).
For crop and pan, drag the Pan slider for each clip, click Centre, or try Auto (subject).
Add captions if you want them, then export an MP4.

About Auto (subject). It looks for a face with Apple's on-device Vision framework and, if there isn't one, for the most prominent object, then sets the pan for that clip. On our test footage a subject at the left of the frame ended up centred in the vertical export. We haven't yet tested it on real faces, so check each clip and adjust the slider if needed. It sets one position per clip; it doesn't follow a subject who moves across the frame.

Phone video recorded sideways or upside down

Videos carry an orientation flag from the phone. Stillreel reads it: in our tests, clips flagged as rotated by 90, 180 and 270 degrees all exported the right way up.

Tips for vertical video

Before cropping, check that nothing important happens at the edges of the shot; a 9:16 crop keeps only about a third of the width.
Keep faces and text away from the bottom fifth and the right edge, where the apps draw their buttons and captions.
For screen recordings, a blurred background usually reads better than a crop.
If you shoot for vertical, frame the subject in the middle third and leave headroom; you'll have more freedom later.

Stillreel exports 1080×1920 H.264 MP4 at your footage's frame rate, which suits all three platforms. Everything happens on your Mac; nothing is uploaded.

Common questions

Can different clips use different framing? The framing choice applies to the whole video, and the pan is set per clip, so each shot can be cropped where its subject is.

Does reframing lower the quality? A 9:16 crop from 1080p footage uses a 608-pixel-wide slice scaled up to 1080, so it is softer than the original. Footage shot at a higher resolution crops more cleanly (our tests used 1080p sources); otherwise use the blurred background.

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