Adding Borders to a Video (Letterbox Effect) This is my first post, so please forgive me if I make any mistakes regarding tags. 

I've been attempting to add a letterbox border to a video in order to give it a more "cinematic" look, but I've been running into issues where borders only appear on one side of the video.

Example of what I'm trying to achieve: 

Example of what I'm getting:

It may be a little difficult to see, but the borders only appear on the left and bottom of the video. I achieved this after following instructions from a video which recommends using the offset command. In the video, the instructor had an option to add this effect to both sides, yet I'm failing to see that option here.

I checked a few more tutorial videos and noticed that their version of Blender seems quite different than my own, with some of their available commands being different than my own.

Regardless, I feel like I'm very close to figuring this out, but I need some assistance. I think that what I need to do is "center" the video so that it appears in the middle of these borders I'm trying to make, but I just can't seem to figure it out.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
I figured it out - I just needed to whip out a pen and notepad to write down the general idea of the instructions I was getting and then improv with what I had available.

For those interested in creating a letterbox effect for their video in Blender, follow these steps and you'll achieve your goal.


If you haven't done so already, drag and drop your video onto the timeline.
Select your video clip
Select the Strip option (should be on the top or bottom of your timeline, depending how your UI looks).
When you click Strip, you'll see a menu. Look for an option to Set Render Size. For me, it was hidden behind the Movie Strip menu.
Look for a menu that shows your video's dimensions (for me it was to the right of the video preview box)
Add however many pixels you'd like to the X and/or Y axis (I personally went with 60 for both sides)
Now look for a menu that shows an option for Offset (for me, that menu was directly beneath the menu where we just punched in our resolutions).
Click the checkbox for Offset and add HALF of the number of pixels you added to each axis in the previous menu. For example, if you added 60 pixels to your resolution on the x-axis, add 30 to your offset.


Congratulations, you should now have a letterbox effect on your video! The checkerbox image you see around the video should default to black once you publish your project. If you'd like a different color than black, you can select Add, which should be near Strip, and then simply click the color option. Expand the color block to equal the length of your video and place it on a lower channel of the timeline so that it doesn't overlap with the video. Select your video and find the Blend option to switch it to Alpha Over so that the video rests above the color.

(By default the color will be black. Simply select it on the timeline and find the Color option in the same menu you found the offset option for the previous steps. Change to a color of your desire).

Thanks and hope this was helpful.