Horizontal vs. Vertical Property Videos: What to Deliver for Each Platform
Where a video will actually be watched should decide its format — here’s the technical breakdown behind horizontal and vertical delivery, and why one video rarely serves both well.
Horizontal (16:9)
Best for your website, YouTube, and listing pages where viewers expect a traditional widescreen video — typically delivered at 1920×1080 (Full HD) or 3840×2160 (4K). This format gives more horizontal room to show a full room or a wide exterior shot in one frame.
Vertical (9:16)
Built for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and how most people now watch video on their phones — delivered at 1080×1920. A cropped horizontal video rarely looks right here, since cropping to a narrow vertical frame can cut people or key features out of shot entirely, and platform UI elements typically overlap the top and bottom of the frame.
Square and other formats
A 1:1 square cut (1080×1080) still shows up occasionally on feed posts and in some ad placements, though vertical has become the dominant format for property content on Instagram and YouTube Shorts.
How we actually deliver both from one shoot
Rather than filming everything twice, we frame interior walkthrough shots slightly wider than a horizontal-only delivery would need, leaving enough room at the edges to reframe a clean vertical cut in editing without losing the subject. Wide establishing shots and driveway/exterior shots are typically reframed with more deliberate composition changes, since a wide horizontal shot rarely works as a vertical crop without losing context. Text overlays and captions are also positioned separately for each format — what sits cleanly in the lower third of a horizontal frame often lands inside Instagram’s UI on a vertical one, so captions are re-placed per format rather than reused at the same coordinates.
Our default
For walkthroughs, we deliver both horizontal and vertical formats as standard rather than making you choose one. Reels and Shorts are shot vertical from the start, not cropped after the fact — see Video Editing for how formats are handled across a single shoot.