Shotcut tutorial · companion page
Rotating the clip is the half of this that everybody already knows, and on its own it makes the picture smaller rather than taller. The part that matters is the project: a custom Portrait Mode video mode at 1080 x 1920, and then one Rotate and Scale filter turned to 90.0 deg and scaled up until the sideways frame covers the tall one.
Reading in another language? Use the translate picker in the header, or your browser’s own translate command — the Shotcut filter, control and value names are marked to stay in English so they still match what is on your screen.
A vertical video for Stories, Reels or TikTok is not a rotated clip in a wide project — it is a tall project with the clip made to fill it. Both halves are needed, and doing only the first is why rotated footage so often comes out as a small picture floating in black.
Settings → Video Mode → Custom → Add.... No stock preset is used. The dialog opens holding the current landscape mode and the two resolution numbers are simply swapped.
The mode is given a Name, Portrait Mode, which saves it as a reusable preset rather than a one-off. Frames/sec, Scan mode and Colorspace are left exactly as they came.
Rotate and Scale is the only filter in the whole build. Rotation and Scale are the only fields touched; X offset / Y offset and the Background color swatch are never moved off their defaults.
At 90.0 deg the picture is correct but small. Scale is pushed to 200 %, pulled back to 150 %, and settled at 178.0 % — the value where the sideways frame covers the tall one with nothing left over.
This video carries no chapter markers. The stops below were derived from the screencaps themselves and are named by this page, not by the video. Frames were sampled once every 10 seconds, which over 2:12 gives only thirteen of them — very thin coverage, and enough of this build happens between two frames that the cards say so wherever it does. Click any screencap or timestamp to play from that exact second, right here in the card.
A green 1920 x 1080 test card behind a title that states the whole job: a landscape frame, the shape of a computer screen, has to end up as a portrait frame, the shape of a phone screen. Nothing is disguised in this tutorial — the footage is a flat green placeholder so that only the geometry is visible.
One still image, 1920-1080.jpg, sits in the Playlist as item #1 with a duration of 00:00:01:20, and one clip of it lies on V1. The player is showing it at its native shape: a wide green rectangle labelled 1920 x 1080, with the black of the project frame only at the sides. The pointer has moved up to Settings in the menu bar, which is where the next four steps happen.
The Add Custom Video Mode dialog is open. It has arrived carrying the current project mode, so every field still describes a landscape project: Resolution 1920 x 1080, Aspect ratio 16 : 9, Frames/sec 23.976024, Scan mode Progressive, Colorspace ITU-R BT.709. A name is being typed into the top box — the small print underneath explains that leaving Name blank makes the mode temporary instead of saving a reusable preset.
The same dialog ten seconds later. Resolution now reads 1080 x 1920 — the width and height have simply changed places, and the caret is still in the height box. The preset has been named Portrait Mode, so it will be there in the Video Mode menu for the next video instead of being rebuilt.
The dialog has been accepted and the player has changed shape: the frame is now taller than it is wide. The clip has not changed at all, so it sits across the middle of that frame at its original proportions with a thick black band above it and another below. This is the state everyone reaches and then stops at — the project is portrait, the picture is not.
Rotate and Scale is added to the clip from the Filters panel. It arrives with Rotation 0.0 deg, Scale 100.0 %, X offset 0, Y offset 0 and an untouched Background color swatch, so adding it changes nothing on screen. In this build of Shotcut that is the entire control set — there is no Size mode selector, no Zoom, and no separate Position pair.
90 is being typed into Rotation. The picture turns on its side and the label inside it now reads bottom-to-top — but it also shrinks, because a 1920-wide frame stood on its end is 1920 tall, and the project is only 1920 tall itself while being 1080 wide. Shotcut fits the whole rotated rectangle inside the frame, which leaves a small upright picture floating in a lot of black. Rotation alone is never the finished job.
Scale goes to 200 %. That is deliberately too much: the rotated picture now more than fills the frame in both directions, so the black is gone but the edges of the image are being cut off outside it. Overshooting first and coming back is a quicker way to find the fit than creeping up on it.
Scale is retyped as 150 % and the black bands come back at the top and bottom — not as much as before, but still there. The fit is somewhere between this and the 200 % of ten seconds ago, and the rest of the video is spent closing that gap.
Scale reads 171.6 % and is highlighted, mid-adjustment. The picture is close now: it reaches the full width of the portrait frame with only a sliver of black left. This is the number being dialled rather than the number being kept.
The last value visible before the end card: Scale at 178.0 %. The rotated picture now covers the portrait frame edge to edge with no black anywhere, and the frame is fading out. Nothing else on the panel was ever touched — X offset and Y offset are still 0 and the Background color swatch is still on its default.
Every number below was read off the pixels, not out of the caption track. The captions give the order of the steps and they agree with the frames throughout; they state one value the frames never show, and that one is flagged where it appears.
Settings → Video Mode → Custom → Add.... The dialog opens already filled in with whatever the project is currently using, so on a normal landscape project it will read 1920 x 1080 at 16 : 9.
The menu navigation itself is not in any sampled frame — the pointer is on Settings at 0:10 and the dialog is already open by 0:20. The caption track spells the path out, which is where it comes from.
Change Resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 1080 x 1920. Type a Name — in this recording, Portrait Mode — so the mode is saved as a preset you can pick again instead of a temporary project setting. Leave Frames/sec, Scan mode and Colorspace alone, then OK.
The caption at 0:45 also says to flip Aspect ratio from 16 : 9 to 9 : 16. No sampled frame shows that field reading 9 : 16 — at 0:40 it is still 16 : 9 and by 0:50 the dialog has closed. The edit happens in the gap, so this page reports it as the caption’s instruction rather than as something it can see.
Select the clip, open Filters, press + and add Rotate and Scale. Set Rotation to 90.0 deg. The picture turns on its side immediately — and gets small, because Shotcut fits the whole rotated rectangle inside the new frame. That is expected, and it is what the next step undoes.
In this build of Shotcut the filter is called Rotate and Scale and its whole control set is Preset, Rotation, Scale, X offset, Y offset and Background color. There is no Size mode selector, no Zoom and no combined Position field — those belong to the later Size, Position & Rotate filter, which does not exist here. If your Shotcut shows Size, Position & Rotate instead, the equivalent is Rotation plus a Size mode of Fill.
Push Scale up until the rotated picture covers the frame. Ben overshoots to 200 %, comes back to 150 %, passes through 171.6 % and settles on 178.0 %. There is no calculated figure to copy: the right value depends on how much of your own frame you are willing to lose off the sides, so drag it and watch the player.
Scaling up crops: at 178.0 % roughly the middle vertical strip of the original landscape frame is what survives. If the subject is not near the centre, X offset and Y offset are how you slide the kept strip — both stay on 0 in this recording, so the page claims no value for them beyond the default.
Nothing is exported. The video ends on the working project, then on an end card, so there is no Export panel and no encoding preset anywhere in it.
Read directly off the frames. Where the video never showed a value, the row says so rather than filling in a plausible one.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | Not shown on screen | Help → About Shotcut is never opened; the title bar reads only Untitled* - Shotcut. The video description states V20.02.17, and the filter set on screen matches that era |
| Source clip | 1920-1080.jpg | Playlist item #1 — a flat green test image, not footage |
| Clip duration | 00:00:01:20 | Playlist readout |
| Tracks | V1 | One video track, one clip |
| Project video mode | Custom, not a stock preset | Settings → Video Mode → Custom → Add... |
| Filter | Rotate and Scale | The only filter in the build |
| Export | Not shown | The video ends on the working project and an end card |
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Portrait Mode | Naming it saves a reusable preset instead of a temporary mode |
| Resolution, as the dialog opens | 1920 x 1080 | Inherited from the landscape project |
| Resolution, as set | 1080 x 1920 | The two numbers swapped |
| Aspect ratio, as shown | 16 : 9 | Still reading 16 : 9 in the last frame that shows the dialog, at 0:40 |
| Aspect ratio, per the captions | 9 : 16 | Caption at 0:45 says to flip it; the edit falls between two sampled frames and is never visible |
| Frames/sec | 23.976024 | Left as it came |
| Scan mode | Progressive | Left as it came |
| Colorspace | ITU-R BT.709 | Left as it came |
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Preset | Empty | No preset chosen |
| Rotation, on adding | 0.0 deg | Default |
| Rotation, as set | 90.0 deg | The only rotation value used |
| Scale, on adding | 100.0 % | Default |
| Scale, overshoot | 200 % | At 1:20 — too far on purpose |
| Scale, back off | 150 % | At 1:30 |
| Scale, mid-adjustment | 171.6 % | At 1:40 |
| Scale, as left | 178.0 % | At 1:50 — the last value before the end card |
| X offset | 0 | Default, never moved |
| Y offset | 0 | Default, never moved |
| Background color | Default, never opened | The letterbox reads black in the player; the swatch itself is never changed |
| Size mode / Zoom / Position | Not present | This filter has no such fields in this build — they belong to the later Size, Position & Rotate filter |
Four rows are highlighted because they are the whole tutorial: the custom video mode, the resolution that defines it, the single rotation value, and the scale that makes the rotated frame fit. Everything else on this page is a default that was left alone — which is the point of a two-minute tip.
There is no narration. The audio is a continuous music bed for the full 2:12, and the instructions are carried entirely by a caption track Ben wrote and uploaded. All nine cues are reproduced below, verbatim and in order — that is genuinely every word in the video.
Shotcut 2-minute tip — How to rotate a landscape video (computer screen) to portrait orientation (phone screen)
Settings > Video Mode > Custom > Add
Flip the resolution from 1920 x 1080 to 1080 x 1920
Flip aspect ratio from 16:9 to 9:16
Filter > Rotate and Scale
Set rotation to 90 degrees
Change scale to make the video fit the full screen
That’s it!
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These are an uploaded caption track, not text burned into the picture — nothing is printed over the interface in any of the thirteen sampled frames apart from the title card at 0:00 and the end card at 2:00, and the captions appear only when subtitles are switched on in the player. A machine transcription of the audio returns five segments across the whole 2:12, and every one of them is the single word “You” — the filler a speech model emits over music with no voice in it. The audio measures as one unbroken bed: -13.8 dB mean, -0.5 dB peak, silent only for the first six seconds and the last seven, with not one speech-shaped gap in between. There is nothing to transcribe, so the captions above stand in place of a transcript. They give the order of the steps and they agree with the frames throughout, and they state exactly one value the frames never show — the 9 : 16 aspect ratio — which is flagged where it appears above. Every other number on this page came from the pixels.
