Reframe

Every reframe answers two questions: which part of the wide frame survives, and what fills the rest of the tall canvas.

The simplest answer is a center crop — take a tall slice from the middle of the landscape frame and scale it up to fill portrait. That is a [punch-in](/glossary/punch-in), and for a seated interview it is usually the right call. The wider set of options: face-tracking crops that move as the subject moves, split-screen layouts that stack a facecam over gameplay, blurred-background fills that keep more of the original frame visible, and letterbox formats with a custom background for footage where the full frame carries the meaning — a scoreboard, a chart, a leaderboard.

Source resolution decides what the crop costs you. A 9:16 center crop on 1080p pulls a 607×1080 region and stretches it to a 1080×1920 canvas, roughly 1.78× digital zoom. On a phone that reads fine, but upscaled footage tends to come out softer after platform re-encoding than footage that was native resolution going in. The same crop on 4K source starts from a 2160×3840 region and lands near native 1080p. If you get to pick your sources, the ones publishing in 4K quietly raise the quality floor on everything you post.

Technique should shift by platform. TikTok viewers are trained on native vertical, so bars top and bottom read as a repost before anyone has heard a word. YouTube Shorts is more forgiving, partly because Shorts also surface through search, where the topic matters more than the framing. Reels sits close to TikTok. You can ship one 9:16 master everywhere and most clippers do — a tighter punch-in for TikTok and a blur-fill or split-screen for [Shorts](/blog/how-to-reframe-landscape-to-portrait-video) is a refinement, not a requirement.

Done by hand, this means keyframing the crop position shot by shot. AutoClip performs the reframe as part of generating the clip: the speaker stays centered when the shot moves, and gaming footage gets a facecam split layout rather than one crop forced over two subjects. Pro exports the same moment at several aspect ratios (9:16, 1:1, 16:9, 4:5) so one clip covers Shorts, a feed post, and a landscape upload; Scale exports at 4K. The [pricing page](/pricing) shows where each lands.