Crop to fill vs. fit with bars
There are only two honest ways to put a 16:9 clip into a 9:16 frame, and this tool gives you both. Crop scales the video up until it covers the whole target frame, then trims whatever spills past the edges — your subject fills the screen, but anything near the left and right margins gets cut. Fit does the opposite: it keeps every pixel of the original and pads the empty space with black bars above and below. Crop looks native on TikTok and Reels; Fit is the safe choice when nothing in the frame can be sacrificed, like a slide or a dashboard where the edges carry information.
Which ratio for which platform
9:16 is the full-screen vertical format for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts — it's what the feed expects and what the algorithm rewards. Clipy exports the fast browser-safe 720×1280 version by default so the tool stays usable in a tab. 1:1 (720×720) is the classic square that also reads well in an email or a Slack preview. 4:5 (720×900) is the taller Instagram-feed shape, and 16:9 (1280×720) is standard landscape for YouTube, LinkedIn, and embedding on a site.
Why these are clean bars, not a blurred background
A lot of reframing tools fake a "full" vertical frame by duplicating the video, blurring the copy, and laying the sharp version on top. That looks slick, but it needs two video streams composited together, which the browser pipeline here intentionally doesn't do — it keeps the conversion to a single, predictable filter pass so any input file works without surprises. The result is honest: Crop gives you an edge-to-edge frame with no fake background, and Fit gives you clean black bars. If you specifically want the blurred-background look, that's a job for a desktop editor.
Record vertical in the first place
Reframing is always a compromise — you're either throwing away pixels (Crop) or adding empty space (Fit). The cleanest vertical clip is one that was framed vertical from the start. If you make a lot of short demos for social, Clipy lets you record a region or a window so your subject is already composed for 9:16 — then you skip the crop guesswork entirely.