A couple of weeks ago, I published a tutorial on how to remove vertical bars by adding more elements to your video.

Today, I’m going to show you how to remove black bars using a Gaussian blur. This works in other editing software, but I will be using ScreenFlow for this one, as always.

Remove black bars using ScreenFlow

  1. Open ScreenFlow
  2. Drag your vertical/square video to the timeline
  3. Resize  your video so it reaches the maximum width of the screen
  4. Create a copy of the same video on the timeline. Press Cmd+C then move the playhead to the beginning of the timeline, then Cmd+V.
  5. Turn off the volume on the video at the bottom layer.
  6. Resize the video at the bottom layer so it fills the entire screen.
  7. Apply a Gaussian blur filter on the video at the bottom layer. On ScreenFlow, click the video icon. Go to Video Filters and click the (+) button beside it. Choose Gaussian Blur and click Add. You can change the radius of the blur, the higher the more blurry the background video becomes.

There you have it! Do you have other ideas on how to remove black bars? Let me know in the comments below.

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