The Rotor Blog
Make Vertical and Square Music and Promo Videos
The shape of music is changing. Start resizing your videos with Rotor to fill up those screens on social for maximum impact.
Social media is the backbone of every musician’s music promotion. But with most social activity happening on mobile, and mobile video engagement skyrocketing, what shape that promotion takes matters more and more.
Taking the horizontal music and promo videos you made for YouTube and reposting them on social just doesn’t cut it anymore. To look your biggest and best everywhere that your followers watch you on social, you need vertical and square videos.
Make vertical and square videos in seconds
We’ve taken away all the headaches and frustrations that come with trying to crop videos in other tools, and our new video resizer couldn’t be more simple to use—there’s no complicated maths, pixel dimensions, or aspect ratios to know or learn. If you can tell a square from a rectangle, then you can resize your music, lyric and promo videos with a quick click and a drag. Just click to choose between landscape (aka horizontal), vertical and square so you can share your content on the social media platform of your choice. Then drag the capture window to select what area of the frame you want kept in.
You control the crop
Unlike other video resizing tools, which tend to auto-crop the dead centre portion of your video to create your vertical or square video, Rotor gives you control over what stays in view and what gets cropped out, so that you can make sure you keep your most important action fully visible. In Rotor, you can also resize and reposition your promo text to fit your new video shape, so that your key information never gets lost.
Are square and vertical videos really better for social?
The data says definitely yes. On social, most people don’t rotate their phones anymore to watch videos. So if you only post landscape versions of your album, single, event and official video teasers to Facebook, Instagram, IGTV, TikTok, etc, your followers are either watching you at your smallest or scrolling right by you. Research shows that on social media, square videos get over 35% more views and 80% more engagement than horizontal videos. Plus square videos take up 78% more space in a mobile newsfeed than landscape videos, and vertical videos take up a whopping 160% more space. Remember, social is your stage. Why wouldn’t you fill up that space for maximum impact and give your fans the show they deserve every time you cross their newsfeeds?! (For more stats, check out our post 17 Mobile & Social Video Facts for Musicians.)
Your music and your videos deserve to be seen in their best light. Use Rotor’s all-in-one video creation tool to make, edit and resize all of your music and promo videos for thumb-stopping results.
