How to Make Vertical Clips from a Horizontal Video

By NUR Technologies · October 28, 2026 · 4 min read

Most cameras and screen recordings are horizontal, but the feeds you want to post on are vertical. If you only crop, you often lose the person or the point. Here is a workflow that handles the reframing along with the cutting and captioning.

The problem with just cropping

Cutting a vertical strip out of a widescreen frame throws away most of the picture, and a fixed crop can miss the speaker the moment they move. You also still need to cut the long video into clips and caption them.

The workflow with Offcuts

1. Drop in the horizontal videoOpen it in Offcuts. Transcription, face tracking and rendering all run on your Mac.
2. Let it find the momentsIt scores every second and picks the strongest moments, cut at the end of a sentence.
3. Choose 9:16Offcuts exports 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, and 16:9 for YouTube, from the same moments.
4. Caption and exportAdd captions with word-level timing, then export every clip in one batch.

Tips for vertical framing

• Record with vertical in mind: keep the speaker near the center of the frame.
• Leave room for captions at the bottom and away from the app’s buttons.
• Watch each clip before you publish, to check that the framing works.