I held the phone upright — why is my video letterboxed?

You hold the phone upright and record. Everything looks right on screen. Then you open the file on a computer and the picture sits in a small box in the middle, black bars above and below. You upload it to Reels and the bars are still there.

The cause is the phone itself

A phone camera produces the image in the sensor's native orientation, and that orientation is usually landscape. How the device was held is written into the file as a separate note — and in browser-based recording that note is often not written at all. The result: you hold it upright, the file is born sideways.

Two consecutive recordings on the same phone can come out 1080×1440 and 1440×1080.

That is not a guess; we measured both. The person is upright in each, the phone was held upright for each. Only the frame ratio differs. So you cannot answer “what did the user want” by looking at the file's aspect ratio.

The wrong fix: bars

Most tools take the easy road here: shrink the picture, centre it in a vertical frame, fill the rest with black. Technically they can say “we did not crop your content”. In practice you get a landscape video inside a vertical one. Half the phone screen is empty and the viewer scrolls past in a second.

The right fix: crop — but from where?

When vertical is asked for, the frame has to be filled, and the only way is cropping the sides. The critical detail: cropping from the centre is wrong. A speaking person's face sits in the upper half of the frame, not the middle. Centre-cropping cuts the chin. The crop has to sit closer to the upper third.

• Hold the phone upright while filming — that is still right; the framing intent comes from there.
• Put your face in the upper half of the frame, not dead centre.
• Do not sit near the edges; cropping happens at the edges.
• The framing you see in preview should be the framing you get — if it is not, that tool is lying to you.