How to make a 9:16 Short from a landscape video, with blurred or black bars

The short answer. 1080 × 1920 pixels: that is the Short a 1920 × 1080 landscape clip becomes. Add it to Video Studio, press 9:16 Shorts, keep Blurred bars or choose Black bars, trim the clip, and press Save the video. The whole picture is kept, 1080 × 608 pixels across the middle, and the video is encoded with H.264 at 16 Mbps.

A YouTube Short is a vertical video, 9:16, under three minutes. Footage from a camera, a screen recording or most AI generators is landscape, 16:9. Video Studio fits the landscape picture inside the vertical frame and fills the space above and below it. Everything runs in your browser; the clips are never uploaded.

How to do it

1. Open YouTube Shorts Editor, which starts in 9:16, or Video Studio. Press Choose clips and pick your clips. MP4 and MOV work.
2. Several clips chosen together are sorted by file name, clip 2 before clip 10. To keep your own order, add them one at a time, or reorder them with the ↑ and ↓ arrows or by dragging.
3. Under the clip list, press 9:16 Shorts. The other shapes are "Same as the first clip" and "16:9 YouTube".
4. A landscape clip now needs bars, and two buttons appear: Blurred bars, the default, or Black bars.
5. To trim, tap a clip's name in the Clips list. Type a Start and End in seconds, or play to the right moment and press Start at playhead or End at playhead.
6. Read the line above the button: it states the size, frame rate, codec and bitrate. Press Save the video. In Chrome and Edge you choose where the file goes; elsewhere it downloads. It is named after the first clip, for example IMG_2041-studio.mp4.

The page does not crop or zoom into the landscape picture to fill the frame. The whole picture stays visible, which keeps anything at the sides.

Blurred bars or black bars

	Blurred bars	Black bars
What fills the space	the same frame, enlarged to fill the 9:16 frame and softened	plain black
Looks like	one continuous picture, the usual Shorts look	a letterboxed film
Good for	people, scenery, gameplay	slides, screen recordings, a deliberate frame

Both are drawn into every frame, so the choice cannot be changed after saving. Save again with the other setting if you want both.

A worked example

Three landscape clips, each 1920 × 1080 at 30 frames a second, trimmed as follows:

Clip	Start	End	Length
1	2 s	14 s	12 s
2	5 s	25 s	20 s
3	0 s	18 s	18 s

• Shape. None of the clips is already 9:16, so the shortest side of the largest clip, 1,080 pixels, sets the width: the Short is 1080 × 1920.
• Fit. Each landscape frame is scaled by 1080 ÷ 1920 = 0.5625 to 1080 × 608 and centred, which leaves 656 pixels of bars above and below.
• Length. With hard cuts, the default, the Short is 12 + 20 + 18 = 50 seconds, and the button reads "Save the video (0:50.00)". With a 0.3-second Dissolve at both cuts it is 49.4 seconds, because each transition overlaps two clips.
• Quality. The page says: "1080×1920, 30 fps, H.264 at 16 Mbps, sound AAC 48 kHz stereo". The file comes to roughly 16 Mbps × 50 s ÷ 8 = 100 MB.

How the size and bitrate are chosen

• If one of your clips is already 9:16, the largest such clip sets the size and is never rescaled. A 720 × 1280 vertical clip mixed with 1080p landscape clips gives a 720 × 1280 Short.
• If none is, the longest short side among the clips sets it, up to 2,160: a 4K landscape clip gives a 2160 × 3840 Short.
• The frame rate is the first clip's.
• The bitrate on High is at least 16 Mbps for 1080p and 45 Mbps for 4K, 1.5 times that above 30 fps, or 1.5 times the busiest source clip if that is higher. Maximum, under More options, uses 2.5 times: 40 Mbps for a 1080 × 1920 Short at 30 fps.

If it doesn't work

• The Short came out smaller than 1080 × 1920. One of the clips is a smaller vertical video, and its size was used. Remove it, or accept the smaller size.
• The bar buttons are missing. They appear only when a clip is a different shape from the output. If every clip is already 9:16, there is nothing to fill.
• "This browser cannot encode video." Use Chrome or Edge on a computer or Android, or the latest Safari. An older iPhone cannot encode.
• The video is longer than three minutes. YouTube treats it as an ordinary video, not a Short. Trim the clips until the Save button shows less than 3:00.00.

Questions people ask

How do I convert a horizontal video to vertical for Shorts?

Add the video to Video Studio and press 9:16 Shorts under the clip list. The landscape picture is fitted whole across the middle of a 1080 × 1920 frame, with blurred or black bars above and below. Press Save the video and upload the MP4 in YouTube Studio. Nothing is cropped and nothing is uploaded to this site.

Can I crop the sides instead of adding bars?

Not on this page. Video Studio always keeps the whole picture and fills the empty space with blurred or black bars; it has no crop-to-fill or zoom setting. For a person in the centre of the frame, blurred bars look closest to a full-screen Short. Footage shot vertically needs no bars at all.

What resolution should a YouTube Short be?

A Short is a 9:16 vertical video, and 1080 × 1920 is the common size. Video Studio makes 1080 × 1920 from 1080p landscape clips, 2160 × 3840 from 4K clips, or the size of your largest clip that is already vertical. The frame rate is your first clip's, and the bitrate is shown before you save.

Does converting to 9:16 lower the quality?

The picture is re-encoded, since the bars are drawn into every frame, but at a high bitrate: at least 16 Mbps for 1080p and 45 Mbps for 4K, or 1.5 times your source's bitrate. The landscape picture itself is scaled down to fit the width, 1920 pixels across becoming 1080, which is the same for any vertical fit.

Can I join several clips into one Short?

Yes. Choose all the clips at once and they line up by file name, or add them one at a time to keep your order. Trim each one in the Clips list. They join with hard cuts unless you pick a transition such as Dissolve, which shortens the video by its length at each cut.

Sources

Checked 15 Oct 2026. Every figure on this page is a rule of Video Studio, read from its own code and computed with its own functions:

• The three shapes, the blurred and black bars, the clip order and the trims: the page's controls.
• The output size: the largest clip already in the chosen shape, otherwise the clips' longest short side, at most 2,160 pixels.
• The bitrate: at least 8 Mbps up to 720p, 16 Mbps up to 1080p, 24 Mbps up to 1440p and 45 Mbps up to 4K, times 1.5 above 30 fps; High uses at least 1.5 times the source, Maximum 2.5 times; capped at 160 Mbps.
• The Short's length and shape: YouTube Shorts are vertical videos of up to three minutes, as the YouTube Shorts Editor page states.