Resize Video for YouTube Shorts
YouTube Shorts is 1080 × 1920, the same vertical frame as Reels and TikTok, and it is filled in below. What makes Shorts different is what happens when you ignore it: anything squarer than 9:16 is pillarboxed in the feed rather than cropped, so a 16:9 clip plays as a small letterboxed rectangle in the middle of a phone screen. Reframing it first is the fix.
What to know about YouTube Shorts
Shorts pillarboxes rather than crops
This is the behaviour worth knowing, because it is the opposite of what most people expect. Upload a 16:9 video as a Short and YouTube does not centre-crop it to fill the screen — it shrinks it to fit the width and leaves the rest of the frame empty. The result is a video occupying about a third of the visible area, next to competitors filling all of it.
The same source can serve both players
A clip shot 16:9 has a landscape cut for the main player and a vertical cut for Shorts, and they are different edits rather than different exports. Both frames are on the placement selector here, so the second version is one more pass with the box dragged to wherever the subject sits — usually not the centre.
Leave room for the title and the controls
The Shorts player draws the video title, channel name and description across the lower part of the frame and the action buttons up the right-hand side. Framing a subject dead centre of a 1080 × 1920 export is safe; framing it in the bottom fifth means competing with two lines of text that are not yours to move.
What each shape costs at 1080 × 1920
| Your source | Crop to fill loses | Fit with bars adds |
|---|---|---|
| 1920 × 1080 · 16:9 landscape | 68% of the picture | 656px top and bottom |
| 1080 × 1920 · 9:16 vertical | nothing — same shape | no bars — same shape |
| 1080 × 1080 · 1:1 square | 44% of the picture | 420px top and bottom |
| 1440 × 1080 · 4:3 standard | 58% of the picture | 555px top and bottom |
The crop figures assume the box sits where the tool opens it, centred and as large as the frame allows; dragging it changes where the loss falls, never how much of it there is. That is the trade this page exists to make visible — you can see it here, and you can see it again on your own clip before anything is encoded. The aspect ratio calculator does the same arithmetic for a frame you type yourself, and the trimmer cuts the clip to length before you reframe it.
Frequently asked questions
What aspect ratio does YouTube Shorts use?
9:16, at 1080 × 1920 pixels, which is what this page starts on. YouTube treats anything up to square as eligible for Shorts, but only a true 9:16 file fills the player. Squarer material is pillarboxed into the frame rather than cropped to fit it, which is why the exact ratio matters more here than the exact pixel count.
Why does my Short have black bars down the sides?
Because the file you uploaded is wider than 9:16, and the Shorts feed fits it to the width rather than cropping it. YouTube is not doing anything wrong — it is refusing to throw away part of your picture without being asked. Reframing to 1080 × 1920 here, with the crop box over the part you want, is how you make that choice yourself.
Can I turn a normal YouTube video into a Short?
That is exactly what this does. Load the landscape file, keep the Shorts placement selected, and drag the box across the width to whichever third of the picture carries the subject. You will want to trim it to length as well, since Shorts has a duration cap — the trimmer on this site does that part and hands you a file to bring back here.
Should I upload 1080 × 1920 or something larger?
1080 × 1920 is the right target for almost everything. Going higher is only useful if your source genuinely has that detail, and this tool will tell you when a frame is larger than the picture going into it, because enlarging a video does not add detail — it just makes a softer file that takes longer to upload.
Is anything uploaded to a server?
No. The reframe runs on the video encoder built into your browser, so the file is read from disk, decoded, cropped, scaled and re-encoded without leaving this tab. There is no account, no queue and no watermark, and the finished file is handed straight to your downloads folder.