How much of a 16:9 video is lost when I crop it to 9:16?

68% of the width. A 1920x1080 frame cropped to vertical keeps a strip 608 pixels wide, so roughly two thirds of everything you framed disappears. That is why a talking head shot wide for YouTube rarely survives a straight crop to Shorts, and why reframing is a shot-by-shot job rather than an export setting.

What is the difference between fit and fill?

Fit scales the whole frame until it sits inside the target and pads the gap with bars, so nothing is lost but the picture is smaller. Fill scales until the target is covered and crops the overflow, so the frame is full but the edges are gone. Every export preset is doing one of these two things whether it tells you or not.

Does upscaling after a crop hurt quality?

Yes, and the maths is worse than people expect. Cropping 1920x1080 to vertical leaves a 608x1080 box; delivering that at 1080x1920 means upscaling by 1.78x, so you are publishing an image with roughly a third of the detail the platform expects. Master at 4K if the edit involves any reframing.

Why is Instagram's feed video 1080x1350 rather than 1080x1920?

1080x1350 is 4:5, the tallest ratio the in-feed player will show without cropping. A 9:16 file posted to the feed gets centre-cropped to 4:5, so anything in the top or bottom sixth of the frame is cut. Reels are the exception and use the full 9:16.

What resolution should I master at?

The largest ratio you will deliver, at 4K if you can afford the storage. Downscaling is free and looks clean; upscaling is not. If you know a cut is going out as both 16:9 and 9:16, shoot 4K 16:9 and crop vertically from it, which leaves a 2160x3840 vertical frame with no upscaling at all.

Free Tool

Aspect Ratio Calculator

Solve the missing dimension, read the simplified ratio, and see exactly how many pixels a platform crop takes off your frame.

Resize

Original width

Original height

New width

New height

Type either new dimension and the other follows, keeping the original shape. Fractions are rounded to whole pixels.

Aspect ratio

1,920 × 1,080 · landscape

16:9(1.778)

Widescreen HD

New size1,280 × 720

16:9 (1.778)

Scale67%

Of the original width

Pixels2.07 MP

2,073,600 pixels per frame

Fit or fill

What actually happens when this frame is forced into another shape.

Convert to

Fit — letterbox it

Nothing is lost. Bars fill the gap.

656 px top and bottom

Bars cover 68.3% of the 1,080 × 1,920 frame.

Your footage sits at 1,080 × 608.

Fill — crop it

No bars. The highlighted box is what survives.

656 px cut from each side

That is 68.3% of the width; 31.7% of the frame survives.

Crop box: 608 × 1,080.

Delivering at 1,080 × 1,920 means upscaling the crop by 1.78×. Shoot or master larger if this cut matters.

Platform sizes

Click one to load it as your original size.

The conversion nobody budgets for

Every aspect ratio calculator will tell you that 1920x1080 is 16:9. Almost none of them tell you the number that matters, which is that cropping that frame to 9:16 throws away 68% of the width. Two thirds of the composition you lit and framed does not survive the trip to Shorts. That is a shot-list decision, not an export setting, and it is why vertical cutdowns of landscape footage look like accidents: nobody shot for the crop.

The second cost is resolution, and it hides well. Crop a 1080p master to vertical and you are left with a strip 608 pixels wide. Deliver that at 1080x1920 and the encoder upscales by 1.78x before it ever reaches the platform's own compression. The file says 1080p, the picture is closer to 600p, and the first thing the viewer notices is soft text. Mastering at 4K removes the problem entirely: a 3840x2160 source yields a 2160x3840 vertical crop with pixels to spare.

Fit and fill are also not the only two options, despite being the only two most export dialogues offer. Reframing shot by shot, punching in on the subject and letting wide establishers letterbox, beats a global crop on almost every edit. And whichever you choose, remember the frame is not the canvas: platform UI covers the bottom fifth and the right edge of a vertical video, so a technically correct 1080x1920 export can still put your caption underneath a share button.

Frequently asked questions

Ratios, crops and the pixels in between

Divide both numbers by their greatest common divisor. 1920 and 1080 share a divisor of 120, which gives 16:9. Some sizes never reduce neatly: 1920x804 technically simplifies to 160:67, which is why the industry writes it as 2.39:1 instead. This calculator does both, and shows the decimal so you can compare two ratios that look similar.

More free tools

Safe zone checkerOnce the ratio is right, check nothing important sits under the platform UI.

Subtitle converterMove captions between SRT, VTT and plain text when a cut changes format.

Script timerWork out how long a script runs before you commit to a cut.

Media kit generatorPackage your audience and rates into something a brand will read.

Getting the Frame Right is just the tip of the iceberg

Faceless generates, voices and edits videos in whichever ratio the platform wants, so the same idea ships to YouTube, TikTok and Reels without a manual reframe each time.

Vertical and landscape from one brief
Captions placed inside the safe zone
Posted to your channels on a schedule

Make videos in any ratio

No reframing, no letterbox apologies.

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