Guide · updated Oct 20, 2026

How to cut your Steam trailer into vertical clips for TikTok, Shorts and Reels

You already have a 16:9 Steam trailer. Short vertical clips are how most people will actually see your game. This is a practical checklist for turning one into the other without the result looking like a squashed trailer.

1. Pick 3 to 5 moments, not the whole trailer

A trailer is built to show everything. A vertical clip should show one thing. Go through your trailer (or its shot list) and pull out moments that make sense on their own, with no context:

• A mechanic in action: the core verb of your game, shown clearly once.
• A big payoff: a combo, a boss going down, a huge chain reaction.
• A fail or a funny moment: these get shared because they are relatable.
• A before/after: an empty base versus the finished one, level 1 versus level 30.

If you can, re-record these moments from the game instead of cropping your exported trailer. Cropping a 9:16 slice out of a 1920×1080 frame leaves only about 608×1080 pixels, which gets upscaled and looks soft. Capturing at 1440p or 4K gives you room to crop (a 9:16 slice of a 4K frame is about 1215×2160) and still export a sharp 1080×1920.

2. Hook in the first second

People decide in a moment whether to keep watching. Start on motion or on the payoff itself, and save the logo for the end. A studio logo, a title card or a slow fade-in is where most trailer cuts lose viewers.

• Open mid-action, ideally a beat before the most satisfying moment.
• Add a short line of on-screen text that sets up the clip, for example "POV: one lantern, 400 ghosts".
• Make sure the first frame already looks like gameplay, because many apps show it as the thumbnail.

3. Reframe to 9:16 (1080×1920)

Don't just drop the 16:9 video into a vertical frame with big black bars. On a phone, the gameplay ends up a thin strip. Three approaches work better:

• Punch-in crop: crop to the action and keyframe the crop position so it follows the player or the explosion. Works best for games with a clear focal point.
• Stacked layout: the full 16:9 frame in one half and a zoomed-in detail (the character, the combo counter, a facecam) in the other. Good for strategy, sims and anything where the whole screen matters.
• Vertical capture: if your engine lets you run a 1080×1920 window or a portrait camera for capture, you get native vertical footage. Bump UI and text scale for capture so it reads on a phone.

Any editor with keyframed crop and position works: DaVinci Resolve, Shotcut, CapCut, Premiere Pro. OBS can record to a vertical 1080×1920 canvas directly.

4. Keep text and action out of each app's UI zones

Every app draws its own interface on top of your video: username and caption near the bottom, like/comment/share buttons down the right side, and sometimes a search or tab bar at the top. Anything important under those gets covered. The zones differ between TikTok, Shorts and Reels, and they change with app updates, so:

• Keep captions, hook text and your character roughly in the center of the frame.
• Check your export against a current safe-zone overlay for each app before posting.
• Preview it on your own phone (a private or draft post) once, before you post it publicly.

5. Burn in captions

Many people scroll with the sound off. If your clip relies on voice-over or a sound cue to make sense, add captions burned into the video: short lines, big type, high contrast, placed inside the safe area. Even without dialogue, one or two lines of on-screen text explaining what is happening ("every wave the tide rises") helps viewers who don't know the game.

6. Keep it short and loopable

For most game clips, 10 to 30 seconds is plenty for one idea. Platform limits are much longer: YouTube Shorts can be up to 3 minutes, Instagram says Reels over 3 minutes aren't recommended to new audiences, and TikTok's limits vary by account. Check the app before you export anything long. If the last frame flows back into the first, the clip loops naturally and people watch it again.

7. End on the game name and "Wishlist on Steam"

Close with the logo or game name and the words "Wishlist on Steam" on screen for a second or two. Most apps don't make links inside the video clickable, so put your Steam link in your bio, profile link or post text, and say where it is.

Use your own soundtrack and sound effects where you can. Licensed music may not be cleared for social use, and on YouTube a Short over one minute with an active Content ID claim is blocked worldwide.

8. Upload natively to each app

Export one clean master file (no watermark) and upload it separately to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Don't download your TikTok and repost it to Reels with the TikTok watermark on it: it looks like a repost, and platforms generally favor original uploads. Write the caption for each app separately too.

9. Track which platform brings wishlists

Give each platform its own Steam link with UTM parameters, for example:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/YOUR_APP_ID/?utm_source=tiktok&utm_campaign=trailer_clips

Steamworks UTM Analytics shows visits and conversions (including wishlists) for each tagged link, counting actions within 72 hours of the click. It only counts visitors who are logged in to Steam, so the numbers undercount, but they are good enough to compare platforms against each other.

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