Getting console and PC clips ready for TikTok

Every capture path gives you the same thing: a widescreen file. What differs is how you get it onto a device that can upload.

Start here: where is the clip now?

Converting a clip to vertical is the easy part. The friction is almost always getting the file off the machine that recorded it and onto one that can upload. That step is different on every platform, so find yours below.

One thing is the same everywhere: consoles record 16:9. Ultrawide 21:9 only happens on a PC with an ultrawide monitor. Both convert fine, but ultrawide loses more to a plain crop, which is covered in the guide on cropping linked below.

Xbox

Press the share button on the controller to capture what just happened, and your clips collect in the Captures area. To get one onto a phone, the path that avoids cables is the Xbox mobile app: sign in with the same account, open your captures, and save the clip to your phone's storage. From there it is a normal file you can drop into the converter.

Worth knowing: captures made this way are already 16:9 MP4, which is exactly what you want. You do not need to re-encode or convert anything first.

PlayStation

The Create button saves recent gameplay into the Media Gallery. As with Xbox, the least painful route to a phone is the PlayStation App, which can pull captures off the console over your account rather than over a cable. A USB drive also works and is faster for a batch, but then you are back at a computer.

PC: ShadowPlay, the NVIDIA app, or OBS

On an NVIDIA card, Instant Replay keeps a rolling buffer of the last few minutes and writes it to a file when you press the save hotkey. This is the best setup for clip hunting, because you do not have to decide to record before something good happens. The files land in your Videos folder as MP4.

OBS does the same thing with its Replay Buffer, and is the answer on AMD cards or if you want more control over the encoder.

Since the file is already on a computer with a browser, there is no transfer step at all. Open the converter and drop it in.

Then: making it vertical

Once the file is on a device with a browser, the rest is the same regardless of where it came from:

1. Drop the clip in. MP4, MOV or MKV, up to 600 MB.
2. It finds the minimap, the health and shield bars, and the weapon slots.
3. Trim to the moment worth posting.
4. Export a 1080x1920 MP4 and save it.

File size, and why trimming first is worth it

Console captures are usually a couple of minutes at most, so they fit under the 600 MB limit comfortably. PC captures at high bitrate can be much larger.

Either way, the slowest part of the whole process is uploading, and home internet connections upload far more slowly than they download, often by a factor of ten or more. That is why a clip that takes seconds to copy off a console can take minutes to upload. Trimming to the seven seconds that matter before you upload cuts that wait roughly in proportion, and it is also just a better post.

A note on phones

If your clip is already on your phone, you can do the whole thing there. The converter runs in a mobile browser, and when the export finishes the save button hands the file to the normal iOS or Android share sheet, so it goes straight into Photos rather than into a downloads folder you then have to dig through.