Removing Black Lines In Video

Removing black lines in video is very easy to do and will make your video look a lot more professional.

Black lines occur when a 'vertical' image (When you turn your camera on it's side and take a photo) is added to a video (Which is 'horizontal) - see video for details.

They simply don't fit and you get the dreaded 'black lines' down either side of the image.

There is an easy fix....don't use 'vertical' images in the first place ;-)

But if you have a 'vertical' image you really want to use in your video and don't want the black lines, you will need to edit your image first to fit neatly in the video.

By using a graphics program, like Photoshop Elements, you can 'crop' the 'vertical' image to make a 'horizontal' image (See video below for details).

Click the triangle on the video below to start playing. If the video pauses or starts buffering, please hit 'Pause' and let the video load before watching.

You will have to choose which part of the image you want to show, as you cannot fit it all in for obvious reasons. You really need to use a high resolution image for this, or you may find the new image you create is a little blurry, as you are in effect enlarging the image.

If you are using a horizontal image or video footage, and there are still black lines in video, this is because the size of the video/image is different to the video player you are displaying it in.

You can easily sort this out by changing the size of the video player in the video embed code to match the video, or if the video almost fits and the black lines are quite thin, you can add &stretching=fill to your video embed code, and this will stretch the video to fit the player.

Of course, it may be that you are trying to show a widescreen video (16:9) in a full screen player (4:3) - This normally results in your video being shown in 'letterbox' mode with thick black lines above and below the video.

If this is the case, you need to change your video player size settings to width="470" height="260"

If you find you still have 'black lines' above, below or on the sides of your video, you will need to play around with the video player size settings to get it to fit perfectly.

If the video almost fits the player, you can add &stretching=fill to your HTML video embed code and it will stretch the video to exactly fit the player.

This is really only for videos that nearly fit the player, because it can cause a loss in video quality as it changes the original video aspect ratio.

Hopefully, you will now have no more black lines in video!