1. Upgrade to Vegas Pro 20.

2. Deliver 1080x1920.

I don't have the funds to upgrade at the moment. I know Vegas 20 has new rendering options for these types of situations (or at least that's what I was told),

Are you saying to upgrade to 20 AND deliver 1080x1920? Or 1080x1920 is my only option right now unless I upgrade to 20?

Vegas Pro 20 is the current release and is generally available as an upgrade. It has the option of larger project dimensions.

I think the option was introduced in Vegas Pro 19. [edit] Yes, it was...

Delivering greater than 1080p video for phones is probably well into diminishing returns for what people can actually see.

@Liberty610 You should be able to edit your metadata to change orientation using something like exiftool. as example I used the command: exiftool -rotation=270 couple.mp4

It depends on where your videos are going, but youtube reads the rotation data, as does my media player

Original

rotated

So the suggestion is to edit your portrait videos on their side in VP18 and render it that way, then alter the metadata of encoded file to have it display in portrait. I don't know how reasonable that would sound to you

Set your project settings to correspond to the width and height of your final video.

Adjust the properties of the source video as shown in the video below (using the dimensions of your project, of course).

Render using a render template edited to reflect your desired width and height.

If there are size limitations in V18 you'll need to upgrade or render at a smaller size.

Happy Otter scripts may allow you to render at higher frame sizes than the V18 templates.

@Liberty610 I don't have a clip with frame metadata like yours but was able to turn my usual 4k-landscape sideways for edit by changing the rotation setting in both project and clip properties to 90 degrees. That allowed me to size the Preview window without seeing black bars. Not sure if you need to do that if Vegas reads and interprets the rotation from the clip metadata.

Rendering Magix AVC, matching height and width in the render template, didn't put the 90 degree element into metadata, however. And probably cause your cellphone to show black bars and shrink the frame when you put it back. Swapping the length and width fields in the render template should make it display without bars full size on the cellphone... the Magix AVC Portrait render templates do it that way.

Swapping the length and width fields in the render template should make it display without bars full size on the cellphone.

Except as the OP pointed out he's using VP18 and "Vegas automatically capped the 3480 to 2304". So swapping will only work with 1080x1920, and not with 2160x3840.

Oops. Didn't pick up on that. But here's a workaround. Make the custom template in vp20 and save it. Trial version should be able to do that. Just tested with vp18 and the custom template I made with vp20 appeared and worked.

And that should mean Voukoder will also work for 2160x3840 in Vp18. I was thinking there was a limitation of project true resolution in VP18, which explained the limitation in customization of render templates but the limitation seems to be artificial.