Choose to make a screen recording of a selected portion of your clip to eliminate the black bars. Then use Command>Shift>5 to reveal a cropping control box at the bottom of your screen. However, if you import the corrected clip back into iMovie, it will display the black bars again in the Preview display.Īnother way to eliminate the black bars is to export the vertical clip from iMovie to your desktop. Then you would export the clip or project to your desktop, open it in QuickTimePlayer, and do an Edit/Rotate Clip to turn it right side up again without black bars. That would make it fit the screen although in a sideways orientation. You can also use the cropping feature to rotate the vertical clip sideways. That would remove the black bars but would involve a rather radical crop and zoom of the vertical clip. You can use the Crop to Fill setting from the crop feature to crop to a horizontal 16:9 clip to fit the screen. So, if you display a vertical 9:16 clip from your iPhone, iMovie will insert black bars on each side to make it fit the 16:9 screen. The iMovie display screen has a fixed 16:9 aspect ratio that cannot be changed. One cannot remove the black bars from the iMovie preview display of a vertical iPhone video.

Imovie vertical video