By Harpal Singh · · 6 min read
Your monitor is a wide rectangle. The feed your customers scroll is a tall one. Drop a normal screen capture into a Shorts or Reels upload and you get a thin letterboxed strip across the middle of the phone, with interface text nobody can read and two thick black bars doing nothing. Vertical screen recording should not mean recording every demo twice. It should mean reframing the take you already have.
Why is a landscape screen so hard to turn into vertical video?
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A 16:9 frame fitted inside a 9:16 canvas occupies roughly a third of the screen height. A button that was already small on a laptop is now a speck on a phone.
The obvious fix is to crop to a vertical slice of the recording. But a static crop shows one column of your screen, and software does not stay in one column. You click a sidebar on the left, a menu opens top right, a dialog appears in the centre, and most of it happens outside the slice.
So people end up keyframing a crop position by hand in a video editor, nudging it left and right for every interaction. For a thirty-second clip, that is a surprising amount of work.
How ReScreen's vertical presets work
ReScreen is a native macOS screen recorder and editor, and it treats aspect ratio as something you decide at export, not at record time. The export dialog has nine destinations: As Edited, YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, Instagram Feed, Square, X and LinkedIn, with a live preview of the finished frame beside them.
Choose one of the three vertical presets and the canvas changes for you:
- The canvas ratio becomes 9:16.
- The framing is "Fit screen", so nothing is cropped away, and the space above and below the recording is filled with a blurred copy of it.
The preview in the export dialog shows exactly that frame. Pick "Fill canvas" there if you want the recording to fill the tall frame instead, and choose a solid colour, gradient or image if you prefer those to the blur.
The format is set to MP4 with H.264 at High quality, which the social platforms accept without complaint.
The crop follows what you did
This is the part that replaces the keyframing. While you record, ReScreen records pointer movement, clicks, drags and scrolls as events, the same events that drive Smart Zoom. With "Fill canvas" on a vertical canvas, the framing follows that interaction metadata, so the visible slice moves to where your pointer is working. Click the left sidebar and the frame is there; open a menu on the right and it travels across.
The crop is always held inside the source bounds, so it never slides off the edge of the recording and shows empty space. One thing to set up: click detection, drag tracking and Smart Zoom need the Input Monitoring permission in macOS. Recording works without it, but the zooms that make a tall frame readable do not.
Fit or fill: which should you choose?
| "Fit screen" | "Fill canvas" | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see | The whole screen, scaled down inside the canvas | A tall slice of the screen that follows the action |
| Readability on a phone | Low for full-display captures | High |
| Context | Everything visible at once | Only the area around the interaction |
| Best for | Narrow windows, mobile-sized regions, overview shots | Desktop apps, dashboards, anything with small UI |
With "Fit screen" the space above and below the recording is filled with your chosen background instead of black bars, a blur of the recording by default. A gradient or blur with padding and rounded corners looks deliberate; the guide to screen recording backgrounds and padding covers those settings.
How to make a vertical clip from a landscape recording
- Record normally. Keep the important interactions deliberate: click, pause a beat, move on.
- Trim it to one idea. In the timeline, mark the range and use "Keep Range" to cut the take down to a single moment worth sharing. Speed up any waiting with per-section speed.
- Open Export with ⌘E and pick the preset. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels or TikTok. The canvas flips to 9:16 with the whole screen over a blurred backdrop.
- Watch the preview, and choose fit or fill. The export dialog previews the frame with the same compositor as the export. Switch to "Fill canvas" for a tall slice that follows the action, or stay on "Fit screen" to keep everything in view. If a zoom feels too tight in the tall frame, adjust or delete that zoom block.
- Check the camera bubble. If you recorded your webcam, reposition or resize it for the vertical frame. It is a separate track, so this is a drag in the preview. The webcam overlay shapes guide helps with shape and placement.
- Export, then switch back. Want the 16:9 version too? Choose the YouTube preset and export again from the same project.
Tips for screen recordings that read on a phone
- Record a region, not a whole 5K display. A smaller capture area means larger interface elements in the final frame.
- Let zoom do the pointing. Smart Zoom and the vertical framing work from the same recorded events, so a zoomed, followed interaction is legible even at phone size. See how the auto zoom screen recorder works for the details.
- Make the cursor bigger. "Cursor size" goes up to 300 %, and a Ring or Pulse click effect shows when something was pressed.
- Plan for muted playback. ReScreen does not generate captions, so add them with the platform's own caption tools after upload, and make sure the visuals carry the story on their own.
Who is this for?
Marketers at software companies get the most from it. Every tutorial you already record contains several short clips, and the presets make harvesting them quick. What to post and where is covered in screen recordings as social media marketing content.
Teams building a YouTube presence can treat Shorts as the front door to longer videos, since one take feeds both formats. That is part of building a YouTube channel for a software company.
Founders, indie developers and course creators can post a fifteen-second clip of a new feature, or a teaser for a lesson, without opening a second application.
What the presets do not do
They set the canvas, the framing and sensible format defaults. They do not upload, schedule posts, write captions or add music. The export is a file on your Mac, and you upload it to each platform yourself. The vertical shapes themselves, and how the framing follows what you did during the take, are on the vertical video page. The full list of canvas options is on the canvas and backgrounds feature page, and formats and codecs are on the export feature page.
How to convert a landscape screen capture to vertical
You do not re-record. Open the project, choose the 9:16 canvas, and the recording fills the tall frame and follows the clicks and scrolls recorded during the take. Check three things before you export: that the part you are demonstrating stays on screen, that your camera bubble does not cover it, and that the first second makes sense without sound. Then export with the destination tile for the platform you are posting to. A landscape take converted this way is a finished vertical video, not a letterboxed strip. Vertical video covers the shapes, and screen recordings for social media marketing places the format in a wider plan.
Next step: reframe a take you already have
Open a recording you have already made, trim thirty seconds, choose a vertical preset and watch whether the frame follows your pointer the way you would have keyframed it.
ReScreen runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel, and every plan includes every preset with no watermark. Download ReScreen for macOS and turn your next landscape demo into a vertical clip without recording it twice.
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