Merged Vertical Video Has Black Bars? Fix

Yes, you can merge a vertical clip and a horizontal clip, but the vertical one will sit in the middle of a wide frame with black bars on both sides. Merge Videos puts every clip on one 1920x1080 canvas, so a phone video shot upright (1080x1920) is shrunk until it fits the height, then centered. There is no setting to turn the bars off, and the tool cannot output a vertical file. If the bars bother you, crop the vertical clips to a wide shape first, or keep the two orientations in separate files. Both fixes are below. The merge happens in your browser, so none of the footage is uploaded.

Merge Videos scales each clip to fit inside 1920x1080 without stretching it, pads the leftover space with black, and converts the frame rate to 30 fps, then joins the clips. We ran the tool's own filter on a 1080x1920 test clip and measured the result: the picture became a strip 608 pixels wide and 1080 tall, with 656 pixels of black on each side. That means the vertical clip uses about 32% of the frame, and everything in it is smaller than in the original. Nothing is cut off, though. Every pixel of the original picture is still there, just smaller. A square 1080x1080 clip gets bars too, roughly 420 pixels on each side.

Filling a wide frame with a tall picture means throwing most of it away. A 1080x1920 clip stretched to full width would show only the middle 608 rows of its 1920, so the top and bottom of every shot would vanish, including heads and feet. Stretching it instead would squash faces. Padding with black is the only choice that never loses or distorts anything, and Merge Videos does not guess which part of your shot matters. The same canvas also settles other differences quietly: a 4K clip is scaled down to 1080p, and a 60 fps clip is converted to 30 fps. We checked that last one in the same test, the 60 fps clip came out at 30.

If the action sits in the middle of the shot, crop each vertical clip to a 16:9 window before merging. Open Crop Video, drag the box to the part you want, keep it wide, and save. A 1080x1920 clip cropped to 16:9 becomes about 1080x608, so you keep roughly a third of its height. Then merge the cropped files with the horizontal ones. The bars disappear because every clip is now the same shape as the canvas. The trade-off is real: the cropped clip is 1080 wide and gets scaled up to 1920, so it looks a little softer than the original, and whatever was above and below your window is gone. This works best for talking heads and screen recordings.

If you need all of the picture, merge the vertical clips together and the horizontal clips together, and publish two files. Merge Videos still gives the vertical file a 1920x1080 canvas, so the bars come back for that one. A better route is to play the vertical clips on their own and not merge them at all. Phone galleries and TikTok or Instagram uploads handle each clip fine as a single vertical video. Merge only when a single wide file is the goal, such as a slideshow on a TV or a YouTube upload. Matching orientation first is also the only way to avoid a jump where the picture suddenly shrinks halfway through.

It cannot make a vertical output, and it cannot fill the bars with a blurred copy of the clip, which is the look many editors use. If you want either, you need a video editor that lets you choose the project size and layer clips. For a plain join of mixed clips where black sides are acceptable, Merge Videos is the quicker path: no sign-up, no upload, and no need to match formats or sizes first. Keep one more point in mind for long phone clips. The whole result is re-encoded in your browser, so a large pile of 4K clips takes noticeably longer than short 1080p ones.