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The aspect ratio problem
You filmed a beautiful 16:9 landscape video. Now you need it for TikTok (9:16 vertical), Instagram Reels (9:16), YouTube Shorts (9:16), and maybe a square post (1:1).
Manually cropping means choosing a fixed portion of the frame and losing everything else. If your subject moves left to right, a center crop misses half the action. If you have two speakers, a tight crop only fits one.
Auto reframe solves this by using AI to track subjects and dynamically adjust the crop position frame by frame.
How auto reframe works
The AI analyzes your video to identify subjects (people, faces, moving objects). It then creates a virtual crop window that follows the most important element throughout the clip.
When a speaker moves left, the crop follows. When the action shifts to the right side of frame, the crop shifts with it. The result is a vertical video that captures the most relevant part of the horizontal frame at every moment.
This is the same technology that broadcast networks use to reframe cinema-ratio content for mobile viewers, now available in browser-based tools.
Reframing, step by step
The process is short. Open the reframe tool, upload your landscape video (MP4, MOV, or WebM all work), and pick a target aspect ratio: 9:16 for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts is the common one, with 1:1 and the slightly taller 4:5 available for the Instagram feed, plus a custom option for anything specific. The AI then identifies faces and moving subjects and follows them with the crop window automatically. Scrub through to check it — it handles most footage well, and where the tracking missed you can nudge the crop position by hand on those frames — then export, and you have a vertical cut ready to post.
Where it shines, and where to step in
Auto reframe is strongest when there's a clear thing to follow. A single speaker moving around the frame is ideal — the AI locks onto the face and tracks it, which covers talking heads, interviews, and presentations. Action with one obvious focal point works well too: a skateboarder, a dancer, a chef at a station. Slow panning landscape shots reframe cleanly because the AI can ride the movement, and two-person conversations work because it can shift between speakers as each one talks or gestures.
It needs a human eye in a few situations. Wide group shots force the AI to choose who to follow, and you may prefer to override it and keep a wider view with smaller subjects. If important text or graphics sit in a corner of the landscape frame, confirm the reframe actually includes them. And rapid cuts between very different compositions sometimes need a manual crop adjustment per scene. Knowing these cases in advance turns "the AI got it wrong" into a quick, expected touch-up.
One edit, every aspect ratio
The real payoff is producing every format from one source. Edit your video once in landscape 16:9, export the master, then run it through auto reframe for 9:16, again for 1:1 if you need a square feed post, and again for 4:5 for the taller Instagram option. A few minutes of reframing replaces what used to be hours of manual cropping and keyframing crop positions by hand.
You can make that even smoother by shooting reframe-friendly in the first place. Keep your subjects centered, since a centered subject survives any crop while edge-of-frame subjects get cut in vertical. Leave headroom, because tall narrow crops punish subjects framed tight at the top. Keep critical text, graphics, and action away from the far left and right edges, which vanish in vertical. And shoot a little wider than you strictly need, which gives the reframe AI more room to work with.
Fitting it into a multi-platform workflow
Making bespoke content for every platform isn't sustainable for most creators, and smart reframing is what makes "create once, distribute everywhere" actually practical. Film in landscape — the most versatile format — edit it once, and reframe for each destination, turning one horizontal YouTube video into vertical content for three more platforms in minutes. Once it's vertical, finish it for the format: captions sized larger and centered for vertical viewing, a film grade for consistent quality, and depth text titles composed for the tall frame. The quickest way to know whether it suits your style is to run any landscape clip through it — the tracking quality tells you immediately.
Related: How to add captions to YouTube Shorts | Best caption styles for social media
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