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There has been a debate for many years now about which way to hold the phone vertically or horizontally when shooting video. I discuss that thinking a bit farther down in this article. But sometimes the best strategy is to know how to resize horizontal video for channels that favor vertical video. Those channels include Instagram Reels and Stories, to name a couple.
And horizontally shot videos like how I shoot them on my podcast livestreams don’t work on Instagram Reels or Stories at all. Just the middle of the video is shown so that wouldn’t work.
Read next: How to record vertical video on PC
Why should we put our videos on Reels anyway?
Reels videos are just 15 seconds but they are new and Instagram seems to favor them as people are scrolling through their recommendations. For example, even my 15-second blurb form a 30-minute livestream had over 161 views already at the time of this writing, which was about 90 minutes after publishing of the video.
There are two ways to resize the video:
Let’s discuss both ways here
How to fit my horizontal video onto Instagram Reels and Stories (manually)
As you can see above the livestreams are split screen shot horizontally. In IG Reels it just zooms into the middle and just shows the podcast logo. That isn’t that great of course. So here’s how I simply from my iPad edited the video.
I picked a 15-second clip and imported it into my Canva.com account. From there I created a new design using the video template.
On my first try, I fit the video (upload through the uploads area) to the templated area. If the video is fit to the video template it looks like this once you try to resize it for Instagram Stories – the template also works for Reels.
That doesn’t work as well either, but it’s an option to crop to just a third of the screen.
Instead of fitting the video to the size, just put it somewhere in the middle.
Then click on resize and pick Instagram Story.
When it opens in the IG Stories template, the video stays somewhat centered.
You can now make it bigger from there as this entire screen will be shown on Instagram. You can even fit it bigger across.
From there I added some background and downloaded the video file, which I could then upload to Instagram.
You can also add additional text or images.
It now works on Instagram Reels and Stories if you want to use it there.
Read next: How to use Instagram Reels templates
Using AI to resize your video
You can also use Opus Clips to resize videos automatically. Go here
Upload your video. It will then ask you how long clips should be.
From there, Opus Clips will give you a number of clips that you can download (and then upload to Instagram – or TikTok or as a YouTube Short) and allows you to edit them.
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