How to Turn Horizontal Video Into Full-Screen Reels

Meta is testing versions of Facebook and Instagram that open on Reels instead of the feed, and if you post landscape video, that changes the first screen your work is judged on. Here is what is confirmed, what is only reported, and how to turn horizontal video into Reels that fill a phone screen instead of a strip across the middle of it.

What Meta is testing

There are two tests, and they are not equally solid.

• Facebook, Reels first. TechCrunch reported on 6 October that some Facebook users in India now open the app into full-screen video, with the classic feed moved to a second tab. People in the test can opt out and go back to a feed-first app. After publication, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the test is also running in Indonesia. MediaPost covered the same test the same day.
• Instagram, a Reels option. Social Media Today reported on 5 October that Instagram is working on a setting to make Reels the main screen, with Stories kept at the top and the regular feed a swipe away. It is based on screenshots posted by app researcher Radu Oncescu. Meta has not confirmed it in anything we could find, and it looks like an option rather than a default.

Two more facts matter for anyone posting video to Facebook. First, this was signposted: in July, Facebook head Tom Alison said Meta would test the layout in video-heavy countries outside the US and "will explore" bringing it to the US next year, which TechCrunch quotes. Exploring is not a launch date. Second, it builds on a change Meta made in 2025, when it said every new video posted to Facebook would be shared as a Reel, whatever its length or format. Both TechCrunch and MediaPost note that.

Why landscape video suffers in a vertical feed

Put those together and the problem is plain. A video you post to Facebook is a Reel, and more of Facebook's audience may soon meet Reels before anything else. A Reel is watched on a phone held upright.

The arithmetic is unkind to 16:9. Fit a landscape frame to the width of a 9:16 screen and it fills about a third of the height, with the rest of the screen left to bars or blur. The alternative, cropping the middle out to fill the screen, keeps only the centre third of the width, and whoever was standing to the left or right of centre is gone. Either way, the platform decides what your video looks like, not you.

Reframing it yourself before you upload fixes both. You choose the 9:16 crop, it follows the person who matters, and the Reel fills the screen.

How to turn horizontal video into a Reel in flshy

This runs free in flshy, in the browser, and the footage never leaves your machine. The full guide with every control is turn a landscape video vertical.

1. Bring the landscape clip in. Drag your 16:9 footage onto the timeline. The file is read off your own disk; nothing is uploaded.
2. Cut it before you frame it. If it is a talking-head take, run remove silence from a recording first. Reframing before the edit is settled means tracking footage you are about to throw away.
3. Open Auto Reframe. Click the clip and open the AI tab in the inspector. Auto Reframe sits in the Advanced group at the bottom; open it and expand Auto Reframe.
4. Choose 9:16, not the Facebook preset. The platform presets set the shape for you, and the Facebook preset is for landscape feed video. For a Reel on Facebook or Instagram, choose the Instagram Reels preset, or the raw 9:16 ratio, for 1080 x 1920.
5. Set how the crop should move. Three sliders shape it: tracking speed, smoothing, and centre bias, which pulls the crop back toward the middle of the frame.
6. Run Analyze and Reframe, then read the result. flshy samples frames across the clip, looks for the subject in each one with face detection first and object detection next, and writes the crop as position and scale keyframes. It tells you the output size, how many frames it analysed, how many keyframes it wrote, and whether it found a subject at all.
7. Scrub, nudge, export. Watch the crop, move any keyframe that lands badly, and export H.264 MP4 up to 4K with no watermark.

Shots that will not survive the crop

A 9:16 window over a 16:9 frame keeps about a third of the width. Some shots cannot be saved by any tracking, and it is better to know before you spend time on them.

• Two people at opposite edges. A wide two-shot of an interview cannot keep both faces in a vertical crop. Something has to give, and the tool will pick one. Cut between them instead, or use a different take.
• Text in the corners. Lower thirds, logos and on-screen titles burned into the edges of the source will be cropped out. Add text again after reframing, inside the vertical frame.
• Wide scenery. A landscape with no subject gets a centred crop. Choose the part of the view worth keeping and set it by hand.

Once the frame is right, put captions where Reels' own buttons will not cover them; our post on captions and overlays for Instagram Reels covers placement. If the same footage is also going to YouTube, turning long videos into original Shorts covers what YouTube's October update means for it.

Keep the landscape version too

Reframing is not a replacement for the original. The 16:9 cut is still the right shape for YouTube, for desktop viewers and for anywhere the screen is wide. In flshy one timeline can be exported at several ratios, so the vertical cut and the landscape cut come out of the same edit rather than two projects.

If you post to Instagram's grid as well, 4:5 at 1080 x 1350 is the tallest shape the feed will show, and Auto Reframe can produce that from the same footage. Vertical for Reels, 4:5 for the feed, 16:9 for YouTube: three exports, one edit.

What to watch next

Neither test is a launch. The things worth watching are whether Facebook's Reels-first layout reaches more countries, what Meta actually announces for the US after "will explore", and whether Instagram's Reels option leaves testing. We will cover each here, with the source linked, if and when it happens. Until then, every guide behind this post is on the tools page.