Video aspect ratios, and which one to use

16:9 landscape — 1920 × 1080 for 1080p. YouTube videos, TVs, laptop screens and most cameras held sideways.

9:16 vertical — 1080 × 1920. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Stories, YouTube Shorts and WhatsApp Status, where the video fills a phone held upright.

1:1 square — 1080 × 1080. Works almost anywhere and survives being shown in either orientation.

4:5 portrait — 1080 × 1350. A tall rectangle that takes up more of a scrolling feed than a square without going full screen.

An app showing a video in a different shape has two choices. It can crop, cutting off whatever falls outside its frame, which is how a landscape clip posted as a Reel loses the people at the edges. Or it can letterbox, adding black or blurred bars, which wastes most of the screen. Either way the app decides what is lost; reshaping first lets you decide.

Crop to a 9:16 slice. The picture fills the screen, but you keep only about a third of the width: from 1920 × 1080 the slice is about 608 × 1080. Good for one person talking or a single subject. Crop Video lets you place the slice.

Follow the subject. For talking-head clips that move around, Video to Shorts moves the vertical frame to follow the speaker and can add captions.

Fit the whole picture with bars above and below. Nothing is cut, but the video is small on the screen. It suits slides, screen recordings and wide landscapes.

Vertical apps draw their own buttons, captions and usernames over the bottom and right of the video. Keep faces and on-screen text away from those edges, roughly in the middle of the frame.

Resolution and shape are separate decisions: Resize Video changes the pixels while keeping the shape, which is the way to make a file smaller without cropping anything.