Love it or hate it, vertical videos are everywhere. Thanks to trendy social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat, it’s a format that some portals have jumped into with fervor, while others have grudgingly added support for it.
As a content creator, making vertical videos is all well and good if you’re shooting and uploading directly from your smartphone. But what if you want to get a little bit of professional editing done beforehand? Let’s show you how to set up your Kdenlive project for vertical video.
How to Set Up Your Kdenlive Project for Vertical Video
Vertical video is avideo editing trend that will likely just keep growingthanks to the popularity of smartphones, which can shoot, edit, and upload basic videos directly without the need for a third-party video editor.
Some of us, however, prefer to use a desktop video editor as a go-between, allowing a bit more creative freedom at the cost of some time and convenience. We upload that vertical video to our desktop in order to edit it traditionally before sending it off to our social media app of choice.
The drawback to this, of course, is that without the proper rendering settings, the final result will come out with black bars on either side as the program attempts to place your video onto the standard 16x9 format.
Some portals, such as YouTube, adapt to that just fine. YouTube, in fact, has an entire section devoted to it, calling it YouTube Shorts—there are manyreasons why creators might opt for posting Shorts. Other apps, however, can struggle to display vertical videos properly, especially on a mobile device when the video has been edited on a desktop.
Built-in mobile web browsers in particular tend to treat the black bars as part of the video, shrinking it down to an unreasonably small size in order to display it properly in a horizontal resolution. Getting rid of the black bars on either side by rendering your video out vertically can help to avoid this. Follow the steps below to do this in Kdenlive.
Step 1: Adjust Your Project Settings
By default, Kdenlive will open with a standard 1920 x 1080, 29.97 fps project loaded and ready to be edited—assuming that you haven’t changed the defaults.
To adjust your project settings in Kdenlive:
If that’s all been done correctly, you’ll notice the black bars on either side of your vertical video in the project monitor have turned gray.
Step 2: Check Your Timeline Settings
Very little should need to be changed with your timeline settings provided that those initial project settings were organized correctly, so you don’t need to spend much time here.
A quick way to confirm that nothing needs to be changed is to make sure that your video in the timeline preview monitor is showing gray bars on either side instead of black.
Step 3: Adjust Your Rendering Settings
Assuming that you’ve set up your project settings correctly, very little needs to be done in the rendering settings beyond choosing the format you’d like your final video to be in.
The most important thing to consider when rendering out your vertical video is to toggle theMore Optionscheckbox and, from there, ensure that theRescaleoption is not enabled. Rescaleis used when you want to create multiple resolutions of a particular video and will override any changes that you make to the initial project settings.
Easily Produce Vertical Videos With Kdenlive
Assuming everything was done correctly, the resulting vertical video will play in any video player with no black bars on either side. And you’re ready to upload it to your platform of choice!
There is no shortage of options out there to share your content. Most platforms support the vertical video trend in one way or another, making each worth checking out to share your content on.
