Reformat a vertical Short to 1:1 and 16:9 with a blur fit
Timeline's blur fit fills a square or widescreen frame with a blurred copy of your 9:16 clip. Each reformat costs $0.10 per output minute on Sume.
One vertical clip can become a square and a widescreen version with Timeline's blur fit, which places your video in the frame and fills the rest with a blurred copy. A clip of a minute or less costs $0.10 per version.
Why bother: YouTube's help page, read on 2026-10-04, says square or vertical videos up to three minutes are categorized as Shorts, so a vertical master suits that feed, while a 16:9 file fits places that expect a landscape video.
The settings
In a Timeline request, put the clip in video[] with fit set to blur. The fit choices are cover (default), contain, stretch and blur. Set output.width and output.height to even values between 256 and 2160. The default output is 1080 by 1920.
| Version | Width | Height | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical master | 1080 | 1920 | cover |
| Square | 1080 | 1080 | blur |
| Widescreen | 1920 | 1080 | blur |
Cost
Timeline renders cost $0.10 per output minute, rounded up. A 45-second clip is one minute, so the square and the widescreen version are $0.20 together. Use the unbilled plan endpoint before the first render to check the request.
When blur is the wrong choice
A blurred background is a filler, not a recomposition. If the subject sits at the edge of the vertical frame, a widescreen version of the same crop may look off. For text-heavy clips, check that captions stay inside the narrow center column.
Sources
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Written by Sume