Turning 27 Games Into Reels — 1.5x Speed, 9:16, and Links That Do Not Click

Info

Our Instagram account had 27 posts and not a single video. The gameplay clips we had already recorded for YouTube Shorts were sitting unused, so we re-cut all of them into Reels. This post covers the three things that mattered: 1.5x speed, keeping the original 9:16 frame, and the fact that links in an Instagram caption are not clickable.

Not a single video

Opening the account, all 27 posts were image carousels — three app cards bundled together each time. Reels: zero.

But 25 gameplay clips recorded for YouTube Shorts were already on disk. This was not something to make. It was inventory that only needed a change of format.

1. 1.5x speed

The originals run 35 to 47 seconds. That is fine for Shorts, but a silent 30-second gameplay clip is long for Reels. The thumb moves first.

At 1.5x they became 23 to 31 seconds. Same content, different feel.

ffmpeg -i gameplay.mp4 \
  -filter:v "setpts=PTS/1.5" -an \
  -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart \
  reels/snake.mp4

-an drops the audio. Game captures either have no sound or nothing worth keeping, and viewers add their own music anyway. Instagram’s editor even labels it “video without sound”.

2. Keeping 9:16 is not the default

This is where we got it wrong once.

Upload a video and the crop screen appears with 1:1 selected by default. Click straight through and a 1080×1920 vertical video loses its top and bottom — exactly where the score panel and the buttons live.

You have to open the ratio picker on the crop screen and choose “Original”. The preview then returns to 0.56, which is 9:16. We clicked through on one clip and had to walk back from the edit step to fix it.

3. The clips were not all in one place

Twenty-five of them followed our store-assets/<app>/gameplay.mp4 convention. So we scanned the file list and concluded that two party apps had no video. Wrong.

Those two predate the convention, and their iOS simulator recordings lived in a completely different folder. Assets created before a rule exists cannot be found by that rule.

They turned out to be 1206×2622 — taller than 9:16, with an iOS status bar on top and empty space at the bottom. We cropped the status bar away and landed on 9:16.

ffmpeg -i preview.mp4 \
  -filter:v "crop=1206:2144:0:180,setpts=PTS/1.5,scale=1080:1920" -an \
  -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart \
  reels/spin-the-bottle.mp4

crop=1206:2144:0:180 takes 180px off the top (the status bar) and 298px off the bottom (empty space) to make 9:16. A 90MB source shrinking to 5MB was a bonus.

4. Links in a caption do not click

We put three store lines at the end of every caption.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fadongkwon.snake
Toss Mini App: https://fadongkwon.com/toss/snake/
Homepage: https://fadongkwon.com

Worth knowing: a URL in an Instagram caption is not a link. The only clickable link is the one in the profile. We include them anyway for two reasons — to say in words where the app can be found, and to let someone read the address and type it.

There is also a reason only Toss goes through our own site. A Toss mini app has no public web address. It opens inside the Toss app and nowhere else. So we keep a fadongkwon.com/toss/<app> landing page that hands off to Toss on a phone and explains itself on a desktop.

The part we could not finish

The plan was to add the same three lines to the captions of the 27 existing image posts. Caption edits do not stick. The edit request comes back 200 OK and the caption is unchanged. Even appending 40 characters behaves the same way.

On the same account at the same hour, 27 new posts went up without a hitch. So this is not a blocked account — it is a restriction on editing specifically. We moved the link work to the Reels side and will revisit the old posts when the restriction lifts.

Takeaways

• If clips already exist, a format change alone can open a channel
• 1.5x fits the Reels rhythm without hurting the content
• Vertical video survives only if you pick “Original” on the crop screen yourself
• Assets made before a convention cannot be found by that convention
• Instagram caption links do not click. Write them anyway