Edit Vertical Video for Instagram Reels & Stories in Premiere Pro

Today I’m going to show you how to do vertical video for social media. I know it can be a big question mark for a lot of people - how do you set up your timeline? What are the video sizes? So I am going to show you how I do it in Premiere Pro.

You can either film everything vertically - maybe with your phone - which I think is the best way to do it if you are a beginner because you can see exactly what will be in the frame when you go to edit.

The other way you can do this is what I wind up doing, which is a little more complex - I shoot a lot of videos for YouTube and then Instagram is secondary to that work, so that means that almost all my content is shot horizontally. Then I will use the effects tab to scale my video for social media.

The size for Instagram stories and reels are 9x16 (1080x1920) - the opposite of horizontal, or landscape video, which is 1920x1080.

So I have my project open and my clips are imported. Now I need to create a new sequence. Click on the New Item icon - Sequence

Now you can see Premiere has created a bunch of presets for us. How nice. Open up Social and look, they call it portrait instead of vertical but that’s fine, it’s 9x16. 

Now it’s important to note that it has a default frame rate of 30fps. If you want to change that, you just just go over to Settings and select your frame rate - I use 23.976fps. 

You can scroll down and save this as a preset if you’d like.

Give the sequence a name and hit ok.

Premiere has a special vertical workspace for you if you’d like to switch over when you are working with vertical video for social media.

Go up to Workspaces and click on Vertical.

This is a great setup because the program monitor is off to the side so you have so much more room work.

I can drop my vertical footage onto the timeline, no problem.

Now remember, almost all of the footage I shot was in landscape. So watch what happens when I drag my landscape footage onto the timeline.

I get a warning box that the aspect ratio of my clip does not match the sequence settings. Remember, your landscape footage is 1920x1080 and the vertical timeline is the opposite - 1080x1920. 

In this case we do not want to change the sequence settings - we want a vertical sequence and we will modify the clips to fit.

I’ll choose Keep Existing Settings.

You can see in the program monitor that the footage does not fit - there are black bars on the top and bottom. So to resize the footage, first click on the clip, then go to the Effect Controls tab, and Motion. Now use Scale to resize the clip. 

You can also click on Motion and then in the Program Monitor use the Transform dots to resize the footage. Then you can click to reposition and make sure the subject is in frame.

Now it’s time to do our rough cut and simply take out the bad takes.

So I went through and took out all the stuff I didn’t want using the basic tools I just showed you. 

Let’s watch it through!

Now let’s export

You can export directly to these places on the left, but I usually just export as a Media File and then under Preset I choose Match Source High Adaptive Bitrate

That’s it from me! I hope you picked up some useful tips, or maybe it was simply a confidence booster for those of you who may be new to Premiere and are using it for your short form content. And hopefully now you can have more fun playing with your short form content.