How to get clean 9:16 CS2 clips for TikTok

01Why the HUD gets cut off in 9:16

CS2 plays in a wide frame. When you crop a 16:9 recording down to a full-height 9:16 strip, you keep only the middle, roughly a third of the width. Your crosshair and the fight in front of you survive. The kill feed, radar and most of the HUD sit near the edges, so they end up sliced in half or gone.

That is a problem for a frag clip. The kill feed is what tells viewers it was a 1v4 and not four random kills. A vertical clip without it looks like aim footage with no context.

02The manual way: clean capture, crop, rebuild

If you have the match demo, you can get a cleaner source than live gameplay. It works, but expect real editing time per clip.

1. 01Download the match from Watch → Your Matches in CS2 (see how to download old demos) and open it with playdemo.
2. 02Strip the HUD down with cl_draw_only_deathnotices 1. It hides everything except the crosshair and kill feed and is not cheat-protected.
3. 03Find your round with the demo UI (demoui or Shift+F2) and record the play with whatever screen recorder you use, in 16:9.
4. 04In a video editor, set a 1080×1920 canvas and centre-crop the footage to full height.
5. 05Cut the kill feed out of the original frame and place it back inside the vertical frame, or retype it as text. Export as MP4.

playdemo replays/match730_...
cl_draw_only_deathnotices 1
demoui

Steps 4 and 5 are where the time goes. You repeat them for every clip, and again for each platform if you also want a 16:9 version for YouTube. The full command list is in the demo commands cheat sheet.

03The killcam.gg way: 9:16 is already done

killcam.gg reads your match demo from Valve, finds your plays and clips them on our servers. Every clip comes in both 16:9 (YouTube) and 9:16 (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) from one job. The 9:16 version is a centred full-height crop of a HUD-free capture, with the kill feed laid out again for the vertical frame, so no half-cut HUD. On Free, a small killcam.gg logo sits at the bottom centre.

1. 01Sign in through Steam and link your match history once with your game authentication code and a share code (where to find both).
2. 02Play Premier, Competitive or Wingman as usual. New matches are found within minutes of finishing.
3. 03Open a clip and use the switch under the player to pick 9:16 · TikTok, Reels, Shorts.
4. 04Hit Download 9:16 for the MP4, or Share on your phone to send the file straight to the app.

Free clips your top play from every match in 1080p 30fps or 720p 60fps with the small logo at the bottom centre, both formats included. Pro clips your top 3 plays every match, lets you clip any other kill, goes up to 4K 120fps and drops the watermark.

04YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels

TikTok, Reels and Shorts all use the same 9:16 frame, so one vertical MP4 covers all three. On YouTube, square or vertical videos up to 3 minutes count as Shorts, so upload the 9:16 file and it lands there.

Length is rarely an issue for a play. killcam.gg clips start 4 seconds before your first kill and end 2 seconds after the last, and dead stretches of 5 seconds or more get cut down. Audio is game sound only, so you can add a track in the app if you want one.

05Posting from your phone

The site works in a phone browser, no app needed. On a clip, Share sends the 9:16 MP4 file itself through your phone's share sheet where the browser supports sharing files, so you can pick TikTok or Instagram directly. Where it doesn't, it shares the link, and you can use Download 9:16 instead. More in making CS2 clips on your phone.