ReelWorkshop exports vertical 9:16 video at 1080x1920 or 720x1280, and the preview shows you exactly what will render. If a clip looks sideways, stretched, or boxed in with black bars, that's the actual orientation of the source file being carried through, not a rendering glitch.
Most likely cause: landscape footage shot horizontally
Footage filmed with the phone or camera held sideways is landscape at the file level, even if it looked fine on the camera's own screen. When it's placed into a 9:16 timeline, it either gets pillarboxed with black bars on the sides or cropped hard to fill the frame, depending on how it's positioned.
Second cause: a rotation flag that doesn't carry through
Some cameras and screen recorders save a rotation metadata flag rather than physically rotating the pixels. Most players honor that flag, but if the flag is missing, stripped by an earlier conversion, or read differently by the browser's decoder, the clip can preview in an unexpected orientation even though it looked correct elsewhere.
How to fix it
- Check the clip in the inspector first
Open the clip inspector to see exactly how ReelWorkshop is reading the file's orientation before you decide on a fix.
- Re-export the source as vertical
If a clip was shot landscape, the reliable fix is re-shooting or re-exporting it vertically before importing, since there's no in-app rotate tool to fix it after the fact.
- Swap in a vertical retake if you have one
If you filmed the same moment more than once, use the take that was actually recorded vertically instead of trying to force a landscape clip to fit.
- Accept the crop for shots where it works
For some landscape clips, the automatic fill crop looks fine because the subject is centered; check each one in preview rather than assuming they all need to be dropped.
ReelWorkshop doesn't include a manual rotate control or auto-reframe/subject tracking. Orientation has to be right in the source file, because the editor works with what it's given.
Why this matters more for compilations than single clips
A single sideways clip in an otherwise vertical compilation stands out immediately to a viewer scrolling a vertical feed. Mixed orientation across a project also makes the automatic quality scoring less useful as a sorting signal, since it isn't judging orientation consistency, just per-clip quality.
Preventing it next time
- Set your phone camera app to always default to vertical/portrait recording if most of your compilations are for vertical platforms.
- Do a quick orientation check on your device's own player right after filming, before you've moved on to the next shot.
- When importing footage from someone else, ask what orientation it was filmed in rather than assuming.
- Keep a habit of importing clips in small batches so a batch of sideways footage is easy to catch and re-shoot before it's buried in a 100-clip project.
When it isn't an orientation problem
If a clip's orientation looks right in the inspector but the exported file still looks wrong, that points to an export setting choice rather than the source file — check the export settings guide before re-shooting anything.