10 Ways To Deal With Vertical Video in iMovie

iMovie is mostly for horizontal video. But often we end up with vertical video from our iPhones. You can deal with vertical video in many creative ways in iMovie.

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Video Transcript: Hi! This is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at different ways of handling Vertical Video in iMovie on your Mac. 
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Now a lot of us shoot vertical video when we're using our iPhones. It's really easy to shoot this way even if you didn't intend to in the first place and sometimes the video kind of calls for it. But when editing video in iMovie, iMovie really wants to put everything in horizontal mode. This makes sense. If you're showing it, say, on a television then you need to have it in horizontal mode. Televisions are horizontal. So, what do you do if you've got vertical video. There are several different ways that you can handle it. 
Here I have a sample video as a file and you could see it's shot vertical on purpose in this case since the content kind of demands that. Now, in iMovie if I were to create a new project and then bring that video in, I'll simple drag and drop it in here, then you could see I get here a horizontal video and the vertical video takes up the space in the middle. Now maybe this is fine. But if you wanted to do something a little different here are some options: 
First it would be great to edit the vertical video in iMovie. You actually can do it. You could create New. You only have two options here. Movie and Trailer. Both of which are horizontal. But if you go to File you'll see New Movie, New Trailer, and also New App Preview. This is a special mode for developers to create previews of their apps for submitting to the App Store. It is a vertical video and you can use it too. So, I'll select it here and it is going to show me a little information. I could just ignore that. Now it looks like I'm in a regular iMovie project. But I'm going to drag this video in and when I do I can see I've actually got vertical video here. There's nothing to the left or right. So, I can now go to File and Share and then File and export this and I'll get vertical video. Now one problem with this is the highest resolution you're going to get is 1080. If you have 4K video it's much more than that. So you really can't export something at a professional level this way. This is just great for sharing or making something to show at home. If you want to do this professional you're probably going to have to move to Final Cut Pro or some other app. 
Now you may be watching this because you've got vertical video but it is not really vertical. It's horizontal but, for some reason your phone filmed it in the wrong orientation. So when you create a normal iMovie project like this and bring this in you find that your video is vertical and it should be horizontal. You can usually just select it here in the timeline, so it has a yellow outline. Then go to the Cropping Tools here at the top and then you have a way to rotate it Left or rotate it Right. This will correct the video. In this case it doesn't make sense for this example. But if yours was shot with the wrong orientation this is the way to fix it and incorporate it in with the rest of your regular clips. 
Now let's look at ways to incorporate vertical video into a horizontal iMovie project. So, I'm going to create a New Movie Project here and I'm going to bring this video in. Of course, as I mentioned before you could just leave it like this. But if you wanted to fill the entire screen you're going to have to Crop it to select a horizontal area. So I'm going to use the Cropping Tool here at the top. Notice I've got it selected here in the timeline below. Then I'm going to switch from fit, which is going to make sure it fits vertically thus creating these two blank spaces on either side. I'm going to change Crop to Fill. Now you get a box here that's the correct ratio for your project. You can position this wherever you want. You want, of course, to center it so it's just grabbing video and none of the blank space to either side. Maybe get it to where it's going to show something that makes sense. I'll get it to showing this area right here. I'll click the Checkmark button and now you can see I've got horizontal video. It's cropping out everything at the top and bottom. This may work for a lot of video that you shoot. 
Now another option you've got in the Cropping Tools here is to choose Ken Burns. So this gives you a crop area for the start and end. So, for instance, I can have this start up a little higher and end a little lower. I cannot only move the position but actually change the size of this. So this is where it starts, this is where it ends over the length of the video. So now when I go to play it I scrub past and you can see how it gets lower and lower. This is a good way to handle some video, especially short clips. You can always break the clip by selecting an area here in the middle and then using Command B and now I've got two separate clips and each one of these can have a separate start and end. So for instance you can pan down for this one and then for this one you can have it start here and end up. So now it goes down, then back up, over the length of the two parts of the clip. 
Now let's say you just want to show everything just like this. Have it be vertical video in the middle of a horizontal project. Well, you can do better than having black on both sides. You can put a background there. So I'm going to switch to Backgrounds here. There are a variety of different backgrounds you can choose. Let's choose something pretty simple like, for instance, a solid color here, like maybe this blue. Now I want to get this blue underneath the clip. Notice I can't drag it underneath. So what you're going to do is drag it to the right. Put it over there. Then you're going to take this clip and lift it Up. iMovie basically has two layers. The overlay layer at the top and the main layer here at the bottom. So I'm basically placing the video here as the overlay layer and the background as the main layer. I'll stretch this so it covers the same amount. Usually I find it is best to try it a couple of times to get it to snap. So now you can see I've got blue instead of black here on either side. I could have chosen one of these other colors. I could have chosen something like these gradients here or one of the patterns as well. 
Now it would be nice to separate the vertical video from the background a little bit. You can do that but not by using a standard overlay. I'm going to select the overlay here, which is my video. Go to the Overlays Section there and I've got Cutaway, which is what I'm using now, then GreenBlue Screen what doesn't apply here, SplitScreen won't work here either. But Picture-In-Picture will work. If I select that then you could see this appears as a little picture-in-picture. I'm going to snap it to the Top, drag it to the bottom. You kind of have to approximate it there. Then snap it to the middle. Now it looks pretty much the same. If I click the checkmark there you really can't tell the difference. But with picture-in-picture I've got some options. One of those is a border. So I can have No Border, Single Line Border, or a Thick Border. I can use a color as well by clicking on the Color Chip here and using the Color Picker to select any color I want. So now I've got back lines there and you can see it sets it apart a bit. But, in addition, I can go in and have a Shadow. I can ever turn the Border off and the Shadow actually works by itself to create a little separation from the background. 
Now some of the backgrounds here actually are animated. If I look at the first row in particular I have a bunch of different things here and if I move my pointer over it you can see the animation previewed over here. So there are a few things you can do. I'm going to take the Blobs one. I'm going to drag it and replace the background that is there. Then I'm going to stretch it so it fits the same length. Now you can see this animation here. Now if you don't like the colors of the animation just select it and you can actually go to the Color Tools here and you could change the tint a little bit. The saturation if you want. Brightness, make it brighter or darker. Do a variety of different things to create a different color there. You can even click on this tool here and say Match Color and then go to a specific frame in the overlay, click there and it will match the colors inside of your original video. So it create something that looks a little bit more natural. 
Now, instead of using a different animated background you can just use the same video instead. So, just to make it easier to start from here I'm going to delete everything and I'm going to drag in my vertical video there and drag in again on top of that. So it's being used as both an overlay and as the main timeline. So I'm going to select the overlay part. I'm going to change it to Picture-In-Picture as before, and I'm going to overlay it perfectly on top like that. Then I'm going to take the main timeline here at the bottom and I'm going to go to Cropping and I'm going to Crop-to-Fill and select an area, like that. Now you could see the main timeline here is full and the overlay is just the middle Picture-In-Picture. This is an effect that you see a lot of people use to compensate for not having the left and right sides on vertical video. But you can select the main timeline here and do a variety of different things with it. For instance, you can go to Colors here and you can make it significantly darker, desaturate it, or supersaturate it, tint it a little bit like that so that you get something that looks a little different. In addition I'll reset it here and then I'll go to Filters and I'll change the Clip Filter to something else. There are a variety of different things that you can use for interesting Clip Filters. I'm going to go over to the one called Xray. That's pretty drastic change. Notice I can change the amount of the xray. So I can actually get it something close to just in the middle there to dim it or dim it with a negative effect there. Then you can go and add color effects to this as well to get what you want. It also helps to zoom in an extra amount so I will crop it tighter here like this. Now it's a lot more and it doesn't conflict too much with what you're seeing on the sides and what you're seeing in the middle. 
Now if you don't like having movement in the sides and in the main part here in the middle you can just have a still frame from your video. A quick way to do that is to open up the video in QuickTime Player and then go to a frame that you want to use as the still frame. So I'll use this one right here. Then you can go to Edit, Copy. Then I'm going to open up Preview. In Preview I'm going to do File, New From Clipboard and you can see it creates a still image from the frame I copied. So I'm going to do Command S to Save that and I'm going to just name it Still here. You can see now I've got it right here and now I could go back into iMovie here and replace this with the still frame and then now you want to drag it out so that it matches the length. There you go. Then make sure that you cropped it so that it's showing a portion of that. Now you get the same thing but it still on either side and you can still go in and create a filter for it, like I'll use the SciFi filter here and you could still go and change the colors of it if you want, to get what you want. If you're using an image editing tool rather than Preview to create the still frame you can do all sorts of special effects. Like, for instance, you can blur the image so it is blurry on either side and resembles the video in the middle even though you can't see the details. 
One thing I want to mention is that sometimes you'll end up with transitions here. See the little dots at the top left and the top right. You look at the frames past it you can see it is fading in and fading out. You can simply drag these to the end there so that the transition is eliminated. So it is full strength right at the beginning all the way to the end. 
Now another thing you can do is instead of showing the entire vertical video here you can zoom in on a portion of it and then animate which portion is seen. So to do that go to the overlay controls here. This is what we're looking for. This is the Key Frame Controls. So I'm going to move the playback head to the beginning there. I'm going to click here to create a new Key Frame. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to position this where I want including resizing. So I'm going to stretch this a bit, so it is a bit bigger. I'm going to start right here in the middle. I can snap it to the middle there, like that. Now I'm going to move the playback head forward a bit and I'm going to add another Key Frame. You'll notice sometimes the Key Frame stuff disappears. Make sure you have the clip selected. Now, click here and you've added a second Key Frame. Then let's make it look like I'm kind of pointing down. So I'm going to drag up. Now if I look at the video between these two Key Frames you can see it goes from the middle and now it is pointing down. Now I can go over to another section here. Move the playback head there and then select the video. Sometimes the Key Frame thing goes away on its own. Just switch to another tool and then back again. Click here to add a new Key Frame and then let's have it looking up like this. As a matter of fact go all the way to the top there. Now if I look here it goes middle, down, and then up. I can keep adding Key Frames. When you have Key Frames you can use these arrows to jump to each Key Frame. Notice how the playback head it jumping to each one. You can remove a Key Frame by clicking there. It does take some practice so don't expect to be able to do exactly what you want the first time. Maybe have a practice sample video where you animate with Key Frames to get the hang of this especially how these controls kind of disappear and you have to, you know, constantly go back and forth between things to get it to reappear. It will take some trial and error to get things just the way you want but the result can look pretty good. 
So there is a whole bunch of different ways to deal with a vertical video in iMovie on the Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Ways To Deal With Vertical Video in iMovie”

Sheldon

1 year ago

Thanks bunches

carol

I am always learning from you Gary. Thank you for taking the time to make these videos.

Michael

12 months ago

I appreciate the solutions you presented.

Michael T

8 months ago

Verical video, Ken Burns, change direction. Command B, and then in the second half of the clip, click reverse direction. (swapping "start" and "end" frames seamlessly)

Siobhan

7 months ago

Hi Gary. I often revert to your videos when I need iMovie help. When I use a background with Picture in Picture for a vertical video or picture, my background and picture don't sync exactly. The background appears first and then the picture and the same at the end with the background lasting longer than the pic. They are exactly the same length. I have snapping on. Can I fix this somehow? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Siobhan: Look close at your timeline and make sure the overlay is locked to the very start of the main clip. Make sure you don't have any fade-in or transition there either.

Comments Closed.

10 Ways To Deal With Vertical Video in iMovie

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Ways To Deal With Vertical Video in iMovie”

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