Four steps, and one decision you have to get right before you build anything. The whole process with real screenshots, including why a vertical tour is not a crop of your horizontal one.
Choose 9:16 on the orientation screen before you build the tour. A vertical tour is a separate render, not a crop of a horizontal one: 16:9, 4:5, and 3:4 all come out of one render together, and 9:16 does not. If you want a tour for the MLS and a Reel, that is two tours, and deciding which you need first saves you building the same listing twice.
The most common mistake with vertical listing video is assuming you can make the horizontal one first and cut it down later. You cannot, and the reason is worth understanding because it changes the order you work in.
A 16:9 tour is composed for a wide frame. The 4:5 and 3:4 versions are crops of that same master, which is why picking any one of those three delivers all three at no extra cost. A 9:16 vertical frame is a different shape entirely, tall enough that a crop of the wide master would throw away most of the room, so it is composed and rendered on its own.
The practical consequence: decide the format before you build. If the listing needs an MLS tour and a Reel, that is two tours rather than one tour and an export, and knowing that up front is the difference between a five-minute job and doing the whole thing twice.
Here is the process end to end.
Screenshots are from the current Video Studio interface, captured August 2026.
- Cut it shorter than the horizontal version. A twenty-second tour that holds attention on a listing page is long for a feed. Fewer scenes at a faster pace is almost always the better vertical edit.
- Lead with the strongest exterior or the view. Vertical gives you one shot at stopping a scroll, and it happens in the first second. Whatever your best frame is, it should not be third.
- Mind the safe area. Reels and Stories overlay captions, usernames, and buttons across the top and bottom of the frame. Anything essential near the very top or bottom edge can end up behind interface furniture.
- Render both when the listing warrants it. If a property is going on the MLS and on Reels, budget for two tours rather than trying to make one serve both. The horizontal render still gives you three formats, so two renders covers every surface.
- Fix the photos first. A flat sky or a cluttered room is more obvious held on a full phone screen than glanced at in a grid. Correct the stills before you animate them.
When it fits: You already have a horizontal tour, the deadline is now, and the composition happens to survive a centre crop.
Trade-off: Free and instant, but a 9:16 crop of a 16:9 frame discards roughly two thirds of the width, so rooms read tighter and anything at the edges is gone. It is a salvage, not an equivalent, and it looks like one next to a natively vertical tour.
When it fits: You are at the property, the light is good, and an unpolished but genuine walk-through suits your audience.
Trade-off: Free, native to the format, and often outperforms produced content on Reels. But handheld footage is hard to stabilise and indoor light is unforgiving on a phone, so a bad walk-through is worse than none.
When it fits: Vertical listing content is the main thing you produce and you want voice cloning, an avatar presenter, or bilingual narration.
Trade-off: Another subscription for one job. Several genuinely beat a bundled platform on reels-specific features, and our roundup of reels tools compares them directly.
When it fits: A flagship listing where the Reel is the campaign rather than one post in it.
Trade-off: Costs real money and takes days, and for most listings the return does not justify it. Worth it where the property is the marketing.
Not within the tool, and the reason is compositional rather than technical. A 9:16 frame is too tall to crop out of a 16:9 master without discarding most of the room, so a vertical tour is composed and rendered separately. A horizontal tour and a full-height Reel are two separate tours.
16:9, 4:5, and 3:4. Selecting any one of those three delivers all three at no extra cost, because 4:5 and 3:4 are crops of the same wide master. 9:16 is the exception and renders on its own.
1080 by 1920, which is the native size for Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Stories. The horizontal format renders at 1920 by 1080, and the two Instagram feed formats at 1080 by 1440 and 1080 by 1350.
Shorter than the horizontal version. A feed viewer decides in the first second, so four scenes at a faster pace generally outperforms eight scenes at a cinematic one. The same property can justify a longer cut on a listing page where somebody has already chosen to watch.
The same photos, yes. The same file, no. The two surfaces want different shapes and different pacing, and a horizontal tour posted to Reels either sits letterboxed in the middle of the screen or gets cropped by the platform. Rendering both is the reason the format choice comes before the build.
A vertical tour is not a crop of your horizontal one. It is a different shape, composed on its own.
Screenshots on this page were captured from the live Video Studio interface in August 2026. If the interface has moved since and this page has not caught up, tell us and we will re-shoot it.