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Creating a vertical video without letterboxing in iMovie?

Is there a way to create a vertical video in iMovie, not a widescreen landscape video where the vertical content sits letterboxed? I have a bunch of vertical video content from my iPhone I'm using for the project, and the closest thing I can think of is the App Preview project that iMovie supposedly offers? But I don't see that option.

Posted on May 29, 2021 11:33 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 29, 2021 3:40 PM

Select each vertical clip in the timeline one at a time, and click on the Crop Tool (the one that looks like intersecting angles) in the tool bar at the upper right of your screen. When the crop controls appear you will see two rectangles with rotation arrows to rotate left or right. Use the rotation controls to rotate the vertical clip sideways. Do that for each clip. Then export the movie to your desktop with the clips sideways. Open the movie in QuickTimePlayer and do an Edit/Rotate to rotate the movie right side up again. That will give you a vertical movie with no black bars.


-- Rich

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 29, 2021 3:40 PM in response to g-pod

Select each vertical clip in the timeline one at a time, and click on the Crop Tool (the one that looks like intersecting angles) in the tool bar at the upper right of your screen. When the crop controls appear you will see two rectangles with rotation arrows to rotate left or right. Use the rotation controls to rotate the vertical clip sideways. Do that for each clip. Then export the movie to your desktop with the clips sideways. Open the movie in QuickTimePlayer and do an Edit/Rotate to rotate the movie right side up again. That will give you a vertical movie with no black bars.


-- Rich

May 29, 2021 5:58 PM in response to Rich839

That's quite the workaround, flipping every vertical clip to be temporarily horizontal, exporting the final video, and then rotating it one more time to make it vertical. I'm hoping there's a faster way to do this in iMovie since I'm working with about 100+ clips. It looks like Final Cut Pro might be able to set the project in a vertical aspect ratio to begin with.

May 29, 2021 7:19 PM in response to g-pod

Yes, it is a bit of a painstaking process to flip all of the clips individually. However, I think I have found a way to do it as a batch.


Put all of your vertical clips in the timeline. Select the first clip and rotate it sideways with the crop tool as described in my earlier post. Then select the rotated clip and do Edit/Copy. Then select the rest of the clips as a batch (click on the first one and Shift-click on the last one). Then do Edit/Paste Adjustments/Crop. That should rotate all of the clips sideways. Then export the project and rotate right side up in QuickTimePlayer.


-- Rich



Creating a vertical video without letterboxing in iMovie?

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